the lily, for good

i recognized the face
of the girl who passed
away recently and to
whom friends were
writing messages of love
and loss across the sterile
wires

we went to high school
together, i'm sure of it,
yet we never spoke and
today the idea of that
leaves me in an echo
chamber with my own
clanging sorrows

i sit and ponder
the face of a woman,
once fully-fleshed and
smiling, who smiles now
no more

whose flesh is forever
seized and withering
but whose soul has been
released to the eternal ether
of the breath of the Goddess
to be re-breathed some day

what changed for her?
- i wondered this -
what transpired that she
be taken now and not later?
what thin variance came
to alter her path?

outside our living room
window stands a congregation
of gilded lilies, weighted
down by a spritz of raindrops
that fell the night before

i imagine the droplets
as souls sent on a call from a
god made caustic for having to
release his children to their
deaths in the name of sacrifice

and they all fell
freely in that darkness,
millions of them across
my small universe

and came to rest
on blades, petals and paths;
steal, rock, and the wool
of the animals in our
pasture

no prescription given,
no forthright agenda
but to descend in earnest
to us here and make whatever
change was open to their
impact

each of them
willing participants
in a ritual of
enlightened
love-offering

their cause known
to no one, no thing,
no beast, not even
to each other

i believe that
my lover, my most
sacred familiar,
is opening

the warmth of
a newly discovered sun
perhaps or the nutrients of
a freshly tilled
earth are pushing
her to flower
anew

without my hand
so much this time
and i stay awake
in reverie of her
new growth
but fearful of my
own waning
influence

i observed the
petals of a particular
lily in our garden
whose flesh was now
dotted with these
felled jewels

and my eye caught
one single droplet
clinging to the lip
of the lily's petal
and i stayed it with
the shutter of my
camera

i've since returned
to my writing and
wonder now what
would become of that
single crystal bead
whose passage began
in the dark with a single
mission and ended in that
precarious hang

will it have fallen
to the grass below
and nurtured something
there, leaving the
lily to her other
agents? and will that
reduce her chances
of flower? will it ruin her?

i think too of the girl
now gone, and wonder
what element might have
collided and clung to her
then fallen away and taken
with it a different fate

and whether had i spoken
to her in a long-ago
past might have favored
her and her own glassy
droplet of life in some way

or if i take a
picture of my lover
i can arrest her
in her frame and
preserve what i think
she is ought to be

and then i'm
reminded:

i must not indulge
fantastic thoughts
about the power of
my own influence
over the cosmic
and the chaotic

the wind blows
and the rain comes
after all, no matter
how i wave my hands

and that i am
not outside of this
but deep within

and the girl is changed
and the lily is
and my lover too

and me

yes. yes of course