Thanks to Erin Penner, I have discovered the poet-philosopher-violinist Jan Zwicky. Lilacs are my favorite flowering bush, and I loved this poem:
Lilacs
Restless, I walk out in the evening
to the old house, to the patio around the back
where the old lilacs bloom.
this is a surprise, for I would have said
I do not like this place, would not
come to it by choice:
the peeling lattice on the south side,
the crumbling cinder blocks that once made
a failed sort of fireplace on the east.
the pad was small, but even so
you have to pick your feet up not to stumble
where the concrete cracked.
The lilacs lean across the south-east corner,
blocking the walk.
If you asked my sister, she would say
it never happened, but I remember that
one spring we tamed a bumble-bee
when it came in the afternoons to feed.
She denies this now, of course,
or would, refuses any salvage, claims I’m inventing
if I say there were moments when the sun came out
like her hair in the shadows of the leaves, heavy, like cream, cut
blunt as a spoon, her small teeth
as she laughed up at me, the bee
humming in my palm as she stroked it: and though I
think hope may be a better guide to the past than despair
I now doubt, too – these lilacs
are probably thick with insects in the afternoons, it’s
ridiculous to think we might have sat inside them safe,
you’d have to be careful, merely brushing by,
not to be stung. When you think of it
she must be right, because why else
would she deny it, and I bury my face
as I might imagine leaning into sea-foam:
cool, explosive, the way her hand
when it touched me could unlock the bone under its skin,
or how the drowned must feel,
rising through themselves from the ocean floor.