The Two Harveys: We Were First Married

Red Lilies by Richard Speakes

For Joan Didion

We tame with explanations any red, provide
meanings into which we dive, the human
foxhole where the mind finds protection.
It’s fabulous out there, and one clump
of red lilies beside the house could be
the bullet that rips through the body of
all those connotations, our symbols,
the stories that make sense of our world.
Red Riding Hood and Christ’s wounds, mother’s
blood,and the color the sun must be as one’s death
gives sunset its purpose, its passion at closure.
And then, rising, the moon punctuates the sentence
one’s life made, its last word that somehow rhymes
with all the words preceding, love and work
and sex. One’s death is by nature that moment,
all the meanings folded into the bundle
one carries, tied to a stick of bone,
as one goes forth into eternity.
That exquisite nonsense is the world
the mind makes from the world it didn’t,
with words that are themselves blossoms
of the invisible, the world as we see it.

(Poetry, 1994)