Molly Tenenbaum

What Have You Not Done Yet?

Not yet floated in the Gold Band lily’s creamy songs,
nor glistened in Apricot Queen’s core chartreuse. 

The silk-wrapped bee-shell hangs mid-pollen in the Lucifer,
and I have not been a spider, have not addressed the shivering center.

When summer solstice went all fuschia on lavender-copper, did I linger?
Leaping for the next minute, that long rippling evening, 

I roofed myself under. And I will have died still owing letters
to a stage-four friend predicted passed by now, but every spring, 

found lambing in the barn. As long as lambs are borning,
she can’t die. You and I did not do our intimacy exercise, 

did not even dip in step one. At every memorial, praise—
What a heart, what a friend. And in the car home, we agree 

what matters: They held you in their clear attention. Your turn,
my turn, ten minutes each of attention, honestly, 

lilies don’t care if I love, that’s why I sit spiced
in their perfume. Though something’s amiss in their soil— 

What purples the stalks? what leathers the leaves?
For the third summer, I have not ID’d the key mineral. 

Nor have I crazed the dishes at the shard required
for none of each set, beyond me, to trouble 

small space in your cupboards. Have not bottomsed-up
the blue curaçao my mother left. Save the last drop 

for my closing salve. And still have not said words of love.
Let us make art under the drift of the lilies, 

their brick-dark powder shading my shoulders,
gold of their hurtle to spill more lilies 

glitzing my hair. Seeing me there, no one could know,
but truly, I wept for dearness of my friends. But for you,

in this, my only flame, I can’t rise softly orange enough,
can’t set orchid violet enough—There’ll be another chance/ 

this be the last. I have sung that refrain
but not grieved in its gloaming. 

I have not chanted pistil and style
until they fractal into multi-colored glass.

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Molly Tenenbaum is the author of four books of poems, most recently Mytheria (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) and The Cupboard Artist (Floating Bridge, 2012). Her chapbook/artist book, Exercises to Free the Tongue (2014), a collaboration with artist Ellen Ziegler, combines poems with archival materials about ventriloquism. Her poems have appeared in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. Her recordings of old-time Appalachian banjo are Instead of a Pony and Goose & Gander. She lives in Seattle, teaching at North Seattle College and Dusty Strings Music School.