Wisteria

Today I’m celebrating the wisteria that’s in bloom all over the cover to the trashcans, gladly abetting me in my efforts to ignore what isn’t worth my limited energy or attention.

Field Guide

No one I ask knows the name of the flower
we pulled the car to the side of the road to pick
and that I point to dangling purple from my lapel.

I am passing through the needle of spring
in North Carolina, as ignorant of the flowers of the south
as the woman at the barbecue stand who laughs
and the man who gives me a look as he pumps the gas

and everyone else I ask on the way to the airport
to return to where this purple madness is not seen
blazing against the sober pines and rioting along the
   roadside.

On the plane, the stewardess is afraid she cannot answer
my question, now insistent with the fear that I will leave
the province of this flower without its sound in my ear.

Then, as if he were giving me the time of day, a passenger
looks up from his magazine and says wisteria. 

—Billy Collins

I’m not sure the flower Billy Collins saw along the southern road was really wisteria, away from its usual trellis, but I’ve had that same experience with purple flowers spotted in a foreign land, hungry for their name.  Mine, in Canada, turned out to be fireweed.  I’m not sure how I finally tracked that down, but it made a surprising difference to be able to call it what others did.

image:  Wisteria sinensis, Christer Johansson