Dickinson's Day Lilies

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2005 by Upton, Lee

"She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand, . . . [B]ut she talked soon & thenceforward continuously- . . ."

-Higginson on Dickinson

Humility wasn't enough,

littleness was not low enough;

the lilies she brought might be firebrands,

globes of incense,

torches clapping the air.

She listened to the god of miniatures inside her

and grasped two branding irons,

two distillates of loons,

and she led the lilies ahead of her to where

she was used to finding nothing

much on the other side of a conversation

but an ampoule of air.

She could not let herself tilt

the room in any direction today, and so

she had considered holding two antlers, two thistles,

two mantles of thorns,

she had considered dangling at her neck

a whalebone or

a diagram of the macula like a family

crest to remind herself:

Breathe in,

do not roar.

The lion in the parlor

is playing the lily bearer

with her two jars of bloody milk,

her two bladders of sun soot

which she can hardly wait to pour

into Higginson's ear.

Only later that night in her bed

must she wonder:

What have I said?

Who saw in me a specimen?

But what had she given away

but a camouflage,

her two broken, golden-necked swans

hissing, fragrance-less.

They weren't notched into her own white paper quite yet.

They weren't what would make her.