Poetry: The scent of geraniums

I’ve plucked spent flowers from geraniums
on the front stoop, knowing new ones come
when withered are gone. I smell my hands,
smell Mary’s geraniums, greenhouse where we went
to buy them, winter plants near the workbench,
basement windows, frosted dusk, summer plants
in beds beneath the twilight porch. To touch them
brought the taste my hands hold now. Memory
is the just pattern in the caterpillars’ back, blue-gray mantra
stretched, cut slate fluid along the pulsing form
of one, one hundred bodies carpeting the plum trunk.
Everything moves in time, fragrant and warm.
Inside the geranium, another set of flowers rises in green
ether, a gentle fist we cannot see, prophecy recalled.
This time, it will be vivid as every tooth in the hound,
every pig’s snout or rasp, barbs sharp and varied
as any wound the butcher’s daughter makes, jackhammer,
wildfire, hail, her breath, blue eyes beneath the lenses
in her glasses. Each cell remembers the shape it will become,
that fanned geranium, damp cluster considering a sphere, scent,
translucent. How can I describe them, what little I know
without missing the clustered filaments, the grief, the colors
the hummingbird knows, cinnamon, rust, joy, turquoise,
bronze? The scent on my skin leads me to the mother
of my mother, three diamonds lost, flower petal, so small,
so red the hummingbird’s heart and wings have no measure
for the bells whose sound wakes no one every thousand years.
Joel Long’s book of essays “Watershed” is forthcoming from Green Writers Press. His book “Winged Insects” won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize.
This story appears in the Octobber 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.