Once I would have walked a mile to see and smell
lilac
blooms.Why? Maybe it was the first flower I recall knowing by name, after seeing a woman carry branches of them in a vase.
From this I took pleasure in learning and remembering the names of flowers and plants, signs such as their color, shape and seasonal occurrence. Then I sought out zinnias, making special trips to neighborhoods where dwellers had planted them in multiple colors and varieties.
Or irises, from a different spectral range and genealogy, the taste of memory of late May,
to rhodoendrons and peonies breaking open spring’s progression into summer,
a cycle begun inside me with the magnolia’s early spring explosion
or flowery fireworks:
As Whitman asks “have you felt so proud to get at the
meaning of poems,” so I took pride in knowing these by name(although probably so much more remote from their meaning,) rejoicing in their
flowering and colors, and maybe above all these reminders to notice both the moment and the passage of
it. These blossom instantaneously (we
would need Edgerton’s invention to see) and fade at the end of their time of
the sun. Within me, a flowering; beyond
me, an impermenance.