Lilies

One dark night I went out alone
and found myself in the mystical show
Gethsemane. On the mystical stone
I prayed where the mystical lilies grow.

Unseen accusers brushed my brow
and also I was cut. Cut somewhere
in flesh between my arms, somehow
most dolorous but then a mystical repair

closed back the skin to trap the nights
inside, their exudate to seep and play
stigmata on that wounde, while bedlights
whispered stories lacking fathers. By day

my nouns mythologized, my adjectives expired.
Each phrase led in and none led out.
It’s all a metaphor, I’d write, except the night.
I left among the lilies all my care.

I left among your lilies all my care.

You dressed your flowers in the dark and made them wear
a smell like sanctity to mask the terror.
Night I needed just to get me there
but night is almost always error.

Despair is what we get from God?
Despair will clean and make you better
but to say it out is to be thought bad.
Despair is sin. And makes you better?

I will have to recommend despair –
but not out loud among my friends.
In talks on prayer, and such: “The point of prayer
is night and night is where it ends.”

I left among the lilies all my prayer
and nights consorting with the mystics: bless
them, bless them Father, give their houses rest
but here are gardens flared with orange hair
who do not spin nor toil to add a single tress
but curl each dawn to “Mary!”

And wait, there.