Like Lilacs

Some lives are like the first apotheosis of the Spring:

beautiful and fleeting – incarnations of the prospect

and the promise of the most alluring loveliness that life

and Spring can bring – that bear repeating and repeating

as they manage to assay their lilting fragrant way to May,

their lilac scent an indescribable intoxication: made

unignorable by traces, faint opacities, of funk: the smell

of Death’s predation – more imminent than we could tell

by looking at them in the full veracities of bloom. Like lilacs,

when they’re cut and placed in vases in a room, they face

the final phases of their doom: in a trauma of aphasia, 

incommunicado with the world that was their love and lot,

every floating beauty in them curls up into rot. Once they

were, now they’re not. Though when they die the Spring

of which they are the symbol won’t have reached a pinnacle,

that seasoned season has amassed from lilac lives enough

to know what pinnacles must be. Perhaps all lives

are more like lilacs than we want to see.

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