Lily
It lived longer than expected,
flourished, in fact, even multiplied.
From the half-dead bouquet
a nephew sent when I broke my hip
that the florist at first mis-directed,
one lone survivor. Fragrance that
made me believe the flowers
and the black box that presented them
had been sprayed with perfume,
maybe Shalimar, scent of
“a brief and incandescent love affair,”
a kind of shill. I discarded the bunch,
tired of watching their collective decay
to an absence of color, but you,
ever the optimist, the diehard,
brought me the living centerpiece,
a rescue like myself, with its
ravishing scent, large hand unfurled,
its attendant stems, branches, pods,
its reach. A constellation
of persistence. Lilies I knew from churches,
the herald of Easter and death,
appropriate to commemorate
my own misstep where I had
prematurely met the earth.
It made of the place where it landed
a half-yard of brilliance, filling the room
with willed essence, as three, then four pods,
defying extinction, opened
in the nights we weren’t there to applaud
or withhold appreciation.
Not Dying
“We’re dying,” he says.
I want to say, no, not that. Failing, maybe.
Like a test we forgot to study for.
Getting ready for bed
I take off what makeup remains,
let my nightgown
fall over my shoulders
like the riffs of a Mozart sonata.
And am I not always leaving something
undone, still to do, for tomorrow?
I wait for the first cool breaths
of morning, assured that the sun
belongs to everyone.
Piles of photographs, textbooks,
on the street just outside,
which should interest someone—
while the moon, here, now, is ours alone,
with its dust and borrowed radiance.
Elaine Terranova has published eight collections of poems, the latest, Rinse (Grid Books, 2023) and two chapbooks. She received the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award for a first book, The Cult of the Right Hand (Doubleday, 1992). Another recent collection, Dollhouse, won the 2013 Off the Grid Press Poetry Prize. She is author of The Diamond Cutter’s Daughter: A Poet’s Memoir (Ragged Sky Press, 2021). Her poems and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Hotel Amerika, and other magazines and anthologies. Her awards include the 2024 Maurice English Poetry Award, a Pew Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Pushcart prize. Leaving the Beach, her translation of poems by Ariane Dreyfus, is forthcoming from Toad Press.