Just Jacaranda

The colour makes you gasp,
and knowing you can't describe it; that words
are too usual: that bloody purest blossom blue
the best Steve Tilston could manage
or maybe just admit it makes you hyperventilate;
or consider the concept of ocular orgasm,
coarse, but compelling, or think of the Hebrew: tehelet,
the silk thread woven into your grandfather's unused
prayer shawl, though in Buenos Aires the locals claim
its able to whistle Tango tunes on demand,
and when you see it dressed up in its Christmas skirts,
pirouetting down the streets of Adelaide to Tchaikovsky
in unimaginable, unutterable, brazen, dauntless blue,
you stop trying to give it a name, remember the way
that naming implies possession -- birth to death 
and you, above all, across continents and seas
where snow bends branches 'til they weep and snap,
cannot possess it; but only the link you make
to your childhood when you first saw its glory, before
blossom carpeted the ground, before you were left
with green silence, tracery of fern, naked foliage;
like the time your grandfather or someone said,
it blooms in places where old Jews go to die.