Poem: 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 .