Cut Lilies

CUT LILIES

My mother had given me a gift of Easter Lilies,

it being Holy Week, and both of us so far from home —

two stalks rising from a little pot, trumpeting their bloom:

one plant pirouetting two soft stalks, each iridescing impossibly its green —

and nine white petals utterly unpigmented, pure in possibility, unfurling

on the air like promise, like the silence of a symphony calling our applause.

All week long, and silently, I meditated on the mysteries

embodied in the flowers, how through dark dormancies derive their power:

their brilliance was the radiance of peace — my heart in bloom, increased.

But soon, the weekend ended; and I returned again to other things,

and set the Lilies in their little pot beneath my window’s opened pane.

They began to wither. First slow, then gradually, as with disease.

I tried to give them water, but only seemed to drown the roots.

I gave them warmth to dry the soil, but still they withered, failed —

until finally I could do nothing more but leave them to the umber sun,

cracked, half-open, to mend the cultivation I’d undone.

The sun bled searingly upon the Lilies, and they wilted more, more still:

their dying was the slow untying of my peace, the heart consumed with grief —

until the thought of leaving them alone was all that I could bear.

This evening, all but two bright blossoms dangle lifeless, dry and brown:

I search the tall, still supple stalks — their chalk-sky brightness absolving

each apology, erasing all regret — with gentle fingertips.

I cut them at the root.

And bring them — fragrant, yet in bloom: to you, my heart — to you, beloved.

— — — — — — — — —

So many times we talk about the sacrifice involved in motherhood. I’ve always loved the fact that that word, sacrifice, at its essence means “to make sacred” ( from sacra + facio, for any Latinists).

My mom died in 2013. Whenever I now think of her, on days that mark her life and passing (her birthday, the anniversary of her death, mother's day), I go on long runs, and tend to look for her — the way the Romantic poet William Blake, as a young boy, saw angels sitting in the trees.

When I was a senior in college, my mom sent me a gift of Easter Lilies to soothe me and the seasonal affective disorder (SAD) I had experienced attending school in the Northeast. I remember how astonishingly radiant they looked: an off-white incandescence as piercing-pure as the chalk a god must use to draft on a supernal sketch-pad when bringing some new creation to the world. It tore my heart when they began to die, despite all my amateur horticultural efforts at keeping them alive. Finally, I cut the two stalks that were still in bloom and brought them to my partner at the time — hoping to redeem a little meaning from the loss that I was feeling.

This poem is an attempt to glean a little meaning in the midst of grief. It was printed on the back of the Order of Service bulletins we circulated at my mom's funeral.

One of my favorite thinkers, the 20th c. religious anthropologist Mircea Eliade, says that when a theophany (the self-revelation of a god) does not occur naturally (as when the angel appeared to Joseph, with whom he wrestled), it is provoked. How often it feels like I am after this — going on long-runs that feel engineered for catharsis, blasting Beethoven or LCD Soundsystem: anything in a minor key that crescendoes piercingly — keening to feel her presence; and yet so often the presence of her I feel I feel as pain.

And then I look at pictures like this one — pulling my mom after me screamingly off a cliff into an ocean — I’m simply filled with thanks.

I used to think that I could somehow make this loss redeemed through writing. There is certainly real comfort in knowing that the sharing of one’s own experience can be occasion for another’s recognition and healing; but still, I would give anything, would let perish all the words and their arrangements, just for one afternoon, one instant,— to hold her hand or hear her laugh, or stand together in her kitchen, or bound aimlessly around town with her on some mundane errand, once again.

My mother used to quote her favorite rockstar medieval mystic, Lady Julian of Norwich, who wrote, “just as God is our father, so certainly God also is our mother.” When I connect with any other mother, any soul who embodies such maternal love (for such love cannot be gendered, even as the divine must be beyond — cannot be bound by — any binaries) I feel real comfort: an ameliorating power that makes me remember what it was to be held in her arms, to take her hand and leap into an ocean, — to feel that just as deeply as I loved, I was loved.