You sink your face into a plume of lilac
forget the name and inhale
the earth’s mauve nerve ending, her gift
to the in-between cholla and sky,
what do the bees know of syringa vulgaris?
Of stem description and taxonomy?
What of the essential sweetness
which shapeshifts into every nose
and cannot conform?
Did the earth imagine her,
or is her sudden eruption of petals
a passing dream?
Milk for the babies?
Evidence of the lower world?
The flowering of fractals,
of clustering ova
no less the architecture of life.
You have never seen the roots of her
but severed a limb to embalm in vase water
as if to remember all that is
not you, the dark world of origin
suspended in water and glass
as if to remember the mistake you have made
in acquiescing to the name.