Lilacs: An Elegy

I'm off to Santa Fe for the weekend, hoping to find
lilacs—spilling over coyote fences, that dusty purple fragrance in the dark—reminding me of that last spring, burning with love and loss that was to come. Seeing Phaedre up the road at St. John's college, sitting apart, alredy changed, for Baccalaureate one sun-struck evening just before the end, never playing the Faure song that would have marked the turning of my life away from all of that, from the time I would always remember when there was, for a brief moment only, a profusion of lilacs.


image: lilac Syringa vulgaris in bloom, Stockholm, Marisa DeMeglio