Lilacs on My Birthday

The flowerets look edible before they open, like columns of sugar dots on tiny strips I bought as a child. Hard to bite the candy without some paper adhering, as adding machine tape will to large, red numbers. Lilacs are like that: another year unspools without major accomplishment, while I question "major" and "accomplishment." And when I find in Costco those clusters of pointillist pastel, I hope they will become someone else's nostalgia—honorable emotion propelling Ulysses toward Ithaca, and a woman to set lilacs in her dooryard as her mother did.