Claire's Poetry Corner | Apr 16

Flowers by Cynthia Zarin

This morning I was walking upstairs from the kitchen, carrying your beautiful flowers, the flowers you brought me last night, calla lilies and something else, I am not sure what to call them, white flowers, of course you had no way of knowing it has been years since I bought white flowers—but now you have and here they are again. I was carrying your flowers and a coffee cup and a soft yellow handbag and a book of poems by a Chinese poet, in which I had just read the words “come or go but don’t just stand there in the doorway,” as usual I was carrying too many things, you would have laughed if you saw me. It seemed especially important not to spill the coffee as I usually do, as I turned up the stairs, inside the whorl of the house as if I were walking up inside the lilies. I do not know how to hold all the beauty and sorrow of my life.