love-lily
dante gabriel rosssetti

Between the hands, between the brows,
Between the lips of Love-Lily,
A spirit is born whose birth endows
My blood with fire to burn through me;
Who breathes upon my gazing eyes,
Who laughs and murmurs in mine ear,
At whose least touch my colour flies,
And whom my life grows faint to hear.

Within the voice, within the heart,
Within the mind of Love-Lily,
A spirit is born who lifts apart
His tremulous wings and looks at me;
Who on my mouth his finger lays,
And shows, while whispering lutes confer,
That Eden of Love's watered ways
Whose winds and spirits worship her.

Brows, hands, and lips, heart, mind, and voice,
Kisses and words of Love-Lily,—
Oh! bid me with your joy rejoice
Till riotous longing rest in me!
Ah! let not hope be still distraught,
But find in her its gracious goal,
Whose speech Truth knows not from her thought
Nor Love her body from her soul.

gilding the lily
lisa ampleman

To keep anxiety at bay, my friend called chemo dragonfly love. Those insects — christened, in places, the devil’s darning needles — hover as they contort their joined bodies into a heart, the male with pincers. Finger cutter, horse killer, ear stick, eye pisser. Look closely at the eyes of a female darner and you may well see dark puncture marks. As a slow drip through an IV. As a pill. Through a port into a vein. She called nausea erotica. Just the same, we name our storms to lessen them — 
not a tropical cyclone, but Arabella, with ballet shoes and bun. Tumors, too, were friends, waiting at the bus stop with backpacks in the morning. Cindy French braids Carrie’s hair, yanking at the scalp to form the tight crisscross. Not hair loss, but deep conditioning. She gave us the new lexicon on stationery embossed with a red rose speckled by raindrops. The stem still had its thorns. Ring-around-the-rosy, red rover, red rover, send her right over. She called death the world of 10,000 things: the dragon courting its damsel, catheter tubing in the wastebin, video of a toddler biting his brother, pas de deux, full-
sugar ice cream, Crimson Queen, Trumpeter, Red Knockout, Tuscany Superb  ...    I knew her as Rose Shapiro. At the funeral I learned she was born Passalacqua: to cross the river, to pass a glass of water.

a dog who ate a pond lily
winifred welles

tired of being my dog, and with grave anger
that there were only ivory bones to eat,
he left me for the pond, filled with a hunger,
half memory, for some immaculate meat

the silver lily
louise glück

The nights have grown cool again, like the nights
of early spring, and quiet again. Will
speech disturb you? We're
alone now; we have no reason for silence.

Can you see, over the garden—the full moon rises.
I won't see the next full moon.

In spring, when the moon rose, it meant
time was endless. Snowdrops
opened and closed, the clustered
seeds of the maples fell in pale drifts.
White over white, the moon rose over the birch tree.
And in the crook, where the tree divides,
leaves of the first daffodils, in moonlight
soft greenish-silver.

We have come too far together toward the end now
to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain
I know what the end means. And you, who've been with a man—

after the first cries,
doesn't joy, like fear, make no sound?

lily
neil weiss

When you rose in your dirndle skirt,
it was as if summer seas
spoke up in the spout of your blouse,
and your face was a moon on these.

Where you sat was a lily pad
underneath, set up for an easel:
each rising bell of water froze
a bubble for maternities.

Children were possible
between your knees, the ritual-
your fears, subject to these,
would hold them off a little longer.

Your thighs in my mind at your rising,
the billow about your hips-
pity stabbed with knowledge an instant!
though the moment would never stand.

But you did. And a bird flew the mesh
into a dissolving brew of whiteness,
my mind empty, and your shoulder
beauty-marked, a little older.

lily morning
ellen kirvin dudis

I woke. I was a pond lily. You weren't
awake to know there was this lily pad
beside you riding the ripples had
your back been water. I'd assumed the unlearnt

nature of flowers ventured on the world.
My cheek rose and fell the exact swell,
wave after wave. And given to behave
your magnificent motive, it ran a purled

excitement all its own, this lily did.
(Remember, the flower was I, waking, and
I've not touched you with a vacant hand
ever, dearest, ever.) I spirited

a lily this morning to be abroad
your beautiful back just as the pond
flowers. But my body was too fond
of us both and rubbed its knowledge where it flowed;

flowers only know to hate a vacant hand.
I woke. I was a lily pad's caress, were
you a river. You woke to the gesture
and shook daylight up and down the naked land.

lily
ron koertge

No one would take her when Ruth passed.
As the survivors assessed some antiques,
I kept hearing, "She's old. Somebody
should put her down."

I picked her up instead. Every night I tell her
about the fish who died for her, the ones
in the cheerful aluminum cans.

She lies on my chest to sleep, rising
and falling, rising and falling like a rowboat
fastened to a battered dock by a string.

love lasts like a lily
solomon j.d fendell

love lasts like a lily,
tender on time's trail;
breathing burning beauty,
fragrant, fine, and frail.