Tyler Smith

The Book of Lilies

I’d like to say I saw the lilies that summer 
growing fat on the surface of the water
with all the leaves and pond scum circling

like waves of translucent memory. Of course, 
I’m not impressioning Monet’s plein-air.
Rather, I only wish I’d seen a good goddamn bundle 

of them taking up space where they had no business. 
Like blue moon blooming wisteria 
fragile across a churchyard cemetery—

a smattering of hushed voices gathered around
reciting old words and older memories still
to your open pitch of earth and air. I’d like to believe 

our reverences make us more than what we are, 
and that a new season’s beauty carries all our past 
wanderlust into present loneliness. 

But all these miles from home, I endure 
the first real drought of summer 
in a too-small apartment deep within the city.

Here, I'm left your little book of hymns—its pages 
dog-eared and filled with lily after lily, lilies upon lilies,
each petal dried and tensioned 

with the watermark of a bleeding and incomprehensible ink.

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