My Amaryllis
by Deborah Digges
So this is the day the fat boy learns to take the jokes
by donning funny hats, my Amaryllis,
my buffoon of a flower,
your four white bullhorn blossoms like the sirens
in a stadium through which the dictator announces he's in
love.
Then he sends out across the land a proclamation—
there must be music, there must be stays of execution
for the already dying.
That's how your pulpy sex undoes me and your seven
leaves, unsheathed. How you diminish
my winter windows, and beyond them, the Atlantic.
How you turn my greed ridiculous.
Now it's as if I could believe in having children after
forty,
or, walking these icy streets, greet sullen strangers
like a host of former selves, so ask them in, of course,
and listen like one forgiven to their crimes.
Dance with us and all our secrets,
dance with us until our lies,
like death squads sent to an empty house, put down,
finally, their weapons, peruse the family
portraits, admire genuinely the bride.
Stay with me in this my exile
or my returning, as if to love the tyrant one more time.
O my lily, my executioner, a little stooped, here,
listing, you are the future bending
to kiss the present like a sleeping child.
RIP DD.
[image from Flower Gardening Made Easy]
Thanks, Moira. Poignant and lovely.
Posted by: Laura Orem | April 14, 2009 at 07:39 AM
I agree.
Posted by: Marissa Despain | April 14, 2009 at 09:38 AM
I, too, love this poem. Thank you, Moira.
Posted by: DL | April 15, 2009 at 01:33 AM
I failed to comment in April, but will go ahead anyway since the hole that Deborah Digges leaves is permanent. Beautiful and haunting, this poem.We are all the lesser for the loss of her. Thank you, Moira.
Posted by: Ernie Wormwood | May 08, 2009 at 02:29 PM
Was Deborah published in the New Yorker? I am thinking of a poem of a little boy's birthday: he sits down on the birthday cake...
Another one is about a veterinarian who stops the car when he sees a cow who is in labour; he gets into the meadow and assists the cow...
Posted by: josefa van emden | February 25, 2010 at 04:44 PM