Lilies Akin to Doorkeepers Women Wear as Jewels on the Chests

Lilies’ whiteness persists
to the summer’s end —
so now its spiny rays
may attest to the birth of autumn,

already gilding those cedars
rising in the marsh, almost always
overlaid and masked in silence —
so long and ever yet that lightly

lit and slanted by the lilies’ scarcest scent
from the luminous and genteel floral face
and its necked flask holding inside still

and mystically compressed beauty’s
firelight — gems as if randomly spread,
yet when gathered to be loved and read.