The Locust Tree in Flower

Among
of
green

stiff
old
bright

broken
branch
come

white
sweet
May

again

– William Carlos Williams

This week the air has been thick with the scent of locust trees flowering and I’m hit with the sweetness of this May ritual each time I step outside. Clumps of white hang heavy on unassuming branches and swing along the treeline. This could easily go unnoticed, in and out with every breath … as if it were always like this, heady, tinged with something intangible, unrecognizable but familiar. Spring is waning just as fast as it arrived and it suddenly feels like deja vu, like something I ached to name but never knew before, and May is like this when green seems greener and the breeze kicks up and dies down just in front of where I stand. It seems remarkable and I can be fooled into thinking this is a new experience. I’ve peeked through a curtain and discovered something I’ve overlooked and it is then that I am hit with a memory that rushes in faster than the scent that inspired it. I realize that May is not being discovered by me, but rather I am being discovered by this. I’ve lived this moment before, in another life, another world. This moment where the locusts lace their way into summer and petals are falling in clusters, like bunches of grapes and we pick them up like treasures and pull them down like snow. And we squirelled them away like popcorn, like magic, like perfume along a treeline, along a fence row, along a dead end road somewhere long forgotten and recollected again in my past so many years ago.