Wisteria

A mile from my house, wisteria grows

in front yards, trailing telephone poles and fences.

Its purple bubbles from scratchy-looking branches

into lilac, lavender, and violet, drooping, billowing

into found trellises of suburbia.

Sometimes in March, sometimes April.

I photograph them every year to remind myself

that beauty crawls out to find you.

People carried the seeds of this climbing flower from

China, Japan so that early nineteenth century

Americans could see what purple could be.

Now it’s rogue, sprawling outwards, a wink.

It’s transplanted, invasive, not native.

I feel like that—I was plucked from elsewhere

plopped in a wiry place to grow.