When May Comes

When May comes,
every year,
and the smell of lilac hangs heavy,
I am plucked from my body,
like a berry from a bush,
and planted on my mother's lawn.

Every May,
it never fails,
I am brought back
by memory or a trickster god
to the purple lilac tree in that green green garden.

I have known,
as have you I'm sure,
a surge of desperate homesickness,
strong enough to steal my breath.
And I have felt sick to the bone
with desire to return to places
that no longer exist.

I have wrapped myself
in new people,
in new places
to cover up the taste
of my mother's cooking.

And you can jump into the creek behind your childhood home,
of course you can,
but it won't be the same water.

And I can spend hours with my face in a lilac tree,
but the smell will never be as sweet
as the one stood on my mother's lawn.