Rhubarb, and: Lilies

Rhubarb

Prune what grows           abominable: let loose that fierce intransigent alive

          inside me, its will like medicine to surpass           both wound

and latest cure, to be cruel           anticipation of winter: self-erasing, deeply willed-for.

          I grow and grow. There’s more of me           to come, you know,

tight coupling           of ambition with ambition, though what else thrives

          too quick I always kill, even salmonberries           or the rare white aster.

Bounty this flush           is simply poisonous, thus I’m my own

and bitterest pill:           internecine interloper, hemlock coiled

at the oak tree’s choked root.           Success: what’s worse than such

          possession? I beg people           take it all, take it off, strip me

of my richness,           but to no use: I have to live

          with what’s overly available. I tell you now,           Ms. Greenhorn Thumb,

Little Symbol Girl           Soured on Sweetness and Plenty:

          fear leakage, seep, containment.           Pray for catastrophe.

Lilies

Such scarlet perfumes dismaying as a twelve-year-old in makeup, the very sex of a flower shop sweated out until the groaning table weeps with them, drips: who would want what announces itself so shamelessly? Each bloom’s a scalded palm, a dying starfish curled back and leaking throbs of damask, sugar, cinnamon, rot–rich oils that slowly tear any house apart. Selfish because the lily is, exists; not human thus not taught to be less. Not subtle, either, though we claimed it once for Mary, her cool and leggy obedience. Spiteful, unremitting, these lilies seize a room’s affections the way I wish I would, my strut a pretense lavished carelessly each night upon merely imaginary suitors. Who else would want to live so overpowered by beauty? Each day another cloying bud bursts until I grow half afraid my skin will ice with pollens, make me almost fierce with them, unsure what’s worth such increase, my very lack of surety. Every ovule draws its honey. And every girl is told to be the blue hood drawn over the white face, eyes enviously working to make everything before them smaller. How amusing should she emulate the lily! Imagine her then, sending out tendrils to thicken like blood, bursting at the fragile seams. Punished once, you learn forever. But the lilies don’t learn. They stay poised in glass vases, waiting with their haughty reds, their gaze of deliberate frankness, demanding only that we take them in and that we love them, or failing love, that we never look away.