“How long do these bloom?” I ask her,
Standing in the night,
The nascent springwarmth fading around us.
As the moon plots its course
Across the thin line of sky it will occupy tonight, she says,
“For a very very short time.”
We lay in the wetgrass for a bit then,
And once the moon has gone and the sun is close to rising
We part. It feels
For a moment
Like she is all the places I never went,
Still ringing loudly in my mind with obsolete importance—she is
A bandaid on soft skin,
Covering numbness.
Not pain.
Three days later
The blossoms fall from the trees in a storm
And the ground is littered with shards of pink.
Walking back along the river,
My bandaid torn off such that it ripped out all the littlehairs,
I smell them:
The tendersweetness mushed against the pavement
Under runningshoes and bicycles and myfeetnow.
Wafting through the air much more fiercely
Now that each flowerfiber is torn.
All year I stood amid a forest of cherry trees, all in bloom.
And I got so used to the smell.