The heavy fragrance
of the white Casablanca Lily
mingling with the white Baferrari Lily
blooming in the ninety-degree heat
of my July garden takes me back
to an Upper West Side street corner
in the early morning winter dark
twenty-five years ago.
Once a week, before work on Fridays,
I hurried a mile downtown
to buy a bouquet of white lilies
from an old man who sold them
from the back of his white van.
He was a round little man
with a gap between his front teeth,
and a gold filling. He taught me
how to clip the sacs of pollen
on the anthers of the stamens
to prevent shedding.
He was one of those oddballs
who eked out a living
on the city streets in those days,
like the knife grinder
or the seltzer deliveryman.
After about a year,
I stopped going to buy them.
I never saw him again.
but he inspired me to grow
my own white lilies.
My mother hated lilies.
She wouldn’t let them into her house
because they reminded her
of funerals and death.
I am not my mother.
In the summer of my convalescence,
I sit under the wisteria arbor.
The heavy flowers droop on their stems,
the air buzzes with insects.
After weeks of illness, of waking up
in the morning feeling sore and bruised,
I rose from a dream,
in which a beautiful young man
told a table of enthralled listeners
how he’d survived a motorcycle accident.
When I woke, I remembered the dream.
I felt rejuvenated, no longer in pain,
all the parts of my body
relaxed and released, like a pond
turning over in springtime,
or a lily perfuming the air.