Among the Lilies

by Lauren Tivey

My liberal mother, with her bristling

Yankee blood, tolerates the South,

because certain charms, like sunshine,

Key lime pie, and Spanish moss, settle

in the blood, reorder the structure

of one’s cells; but also because

she built her life with him here,

their quarter-century marriage thriving

amid the steamy groves, bounty of flowers.

When the cancer takes him, she buries him

close.  Though she is cracked in half,

she arranges everything, and we flock

to her side.  Cemetery clerks,

with contracts, insist on scripture

for the headstone, as if such a union

needed to be sanctioned by anything

other than the ancient goddess of love.

We search the books, and she weeps

over the Song of Solomon 6:3:  I am my

beloved’s and my beloved is mine.  He grazes

among the lilies.  Later, she will lie down

next to him, under the sleek black stone,

with its elegant cut, genteel columns, shelter

of the oak.  People will come, clutching Bibles,

calling to the Lord for her salvation, chiding us

to pray for the soul and its sins.  But on that day,

with a spicy scent of blossoms in the heavy air,

and holier than any doctrine, a husband and wife

will reach for one another.  Together, they will sing

the song of the beloved, and that is all that matters.