After a painting by Lillie Gay Torrey
The month she painted the huge maroon
jug full of gardenias, a few stray blooms
straggled out onto the tablecloth below
and she worked them over with arterial blues
like those bulging in her old, Hawaiian hands.
She buttered up the white impasto petals
with a palette knife, using touch more than sight
since by 80 (her age when she painted them)
her eyes were gone. Some look like thick cups
of snow rubbed rosy at the edges, the fluted
rims brimming with off-light light. They decorate
my mother’s cramped double at the nursing home
(mimicking, in their gilt frame, her one window)
-elegiac there, a barge of gardenias set adrift
on the river of half-shadow streaming in, as if
to honor her tedious journey to the afterlife.
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