Cut Lilies
Noah Warren
More than a hundred dollars of them.
It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them in.
Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner
of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my dining table –
each fresh-faced, extending its delicately veined leaves
into the crush. Didn’t I watch
children shuffle strictly in line, cradle
candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers,
chanting Latin – just to fashion Sevilla’s Easter? Wasn’t I sad? Didn’t I use to
go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage raising
bursting violet spears? – Look, the afternoon dies
as night begins in the heart of the lilies and smokes up
their fluted throats until it fills the room
and my lights have to be not switched on.
And in close darkness the aroma grows so sweet,
so strong, that it could slice me open. It does.
I know I’m not the only one whose life is a conditional clause
hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room and the tremble of my
phone.
I’m not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen
flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind.
When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for decades.
God, I am so transparent.
So light.
About this poem
“‘Cut Lilies’ came during a nadir of loneliness in the early spring. Though I’m not religious, each year I find I need Easter more and more. Blake’s ‘Holy Thursday’ was heavy in my mind as I tried, through something like the pathetic fallacy, to trace the contours of the guilt behind my self-pity and my need.” – Noah Warren
About Noah Warren
Noah Warren is the author of “The Destroyer in the Glass” (Yale University Press, 2016). He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and lives in Palo Alto, Calif.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Noah Warren. Originally published by the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
