Lily

Lily

I know this happiness

is provisional:

           

            the looming presences—

            great suffering, great fear—

            withdraw only

            into the peripheral vision:

but ineluctable this shimmering

of wind in the blue leaves:

this flood of stillness:

                                    Densie Levertov

                                    “Of Being”

I haven’t gone back to look to see

if the lily has dropped that glucose

ooze, or whatever it is (was?)

pooled at the tip of her

stamen.  Maybe I don’t want to

know if it’s all fallen

away, maybe I want what I caught

her doing to be there

in my eye forever—maybe I want

to call that to mind when, needing to

but so fire dry it hurts, the bulging

bubble of her will break

open something in me and finally

after all these cake-wax years

something will begin

to melt, to push out through or simply rise

over the dam.  And speaking

of dams I was thinking yesterday

of their dual person-

ality: how when I was coming

up the road along side the river

I saw the mad spring

rush and rise of white rage first

and then, farther up, its glass

calm, it’s all sky and an abandoned

mill, it’s one lone steeple cross, all,

seemingly, paused.  How does it get

to that edge and suddenly, like clothes

and then nudity, change the whole

damn rule?  And while I, driving by,

or standing at the bank, or now,

here, rooms away from lily in the dark, still

can’t decide: touch her with the tip

of my finger or the tip

of my tongue?  And do I

close my eyes?  And do I hold it all like she did

or fold it into my skin

and let it become me?