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my special place to write....

My special place to write has varied widely-- at art colonies like Yaddo it was under blackgreen pines, or in my room under the eaves with 3 desks. On Rapple Dr in Niskayuna, I stood at the kitchen counter. In DC, in a cove between the couch and the chair. For several years, I wrote mostly on the Metro from Vienna to DuPont Circle ballet class and then to Silver Springs ballet class. I still do but mostly I am writing here at my desk where there are about 60 not yet typed up manuscripts in the cupboard above me taunting me to get to them. They go back to 1990--- all in 70 page hand written spiral netbooks. I hear the sounds of geese—esp. today since they are beginning to mate: crows, herons, cardinals and sparrows. I always write in baggy sweatshirts and yoga pants and I love that soft feeling around me—never in the stylish, pretty Betsey Johnson or Free People mostly clothes I wear to ballroom dancing each night. I wish I could say I smell the wonderful coffee I used to drink but I don’t drink coffee much now and its more likely to be a bottle of water and  some vitamins. I smell the wild plum branches I pick each February to have an early spring flower. In the afternoon I feel the sun thru blinds and much more often,  Jete Pentimento, my Abyssinian cat’s gorgeous fur and purr. Besides writing, I do mail at my desk, sign broadsides, check FB, listen to music—It’s definitely a special place. What you can’t see in the photo is the book case behind me with glittery barrettes, pendants. I can hear the mail truck, and the cat can hear lady bugs, lavender winged flying things against the screen.

I have a house in upstate New York where I used to write at a desk overlooking dogwood and trillium and it’s still my permanent residence but much of the time I am in Virginia. I am on Facebook and my web site (with wonderful photographs of Jete Pentimento) is www.lynlifshin.com
  poem

LIKE A DARK LANTERN

I move thru the first
floor at  3 AM, past
the cat who is curled
in a chair half made
of her fur, turning
her back on air
conditioning, startled
to find me prowling
in the dark as if I was
intruding on stars and
moon and the ripple
in water that spits
back the plum trees.
Grass smells grassier.
The clock inches slowly
toward the light. A
creak of wood and the
soft scratch on the blue
Persian rug the cat claws
gently merge with some
night bird I’ve never
seen like a poem that
goes along and suddenly,
at the end, like a banked
fire, explodes into the
wildest flame that finishes
off everything that has
come before it perfectly

Last Updated:

February 29, 2016 }