The purple anemones from the Sunday market
are glorious all week long.
But there is an instant,
sometime on Wednesday,
when they pass from blooming beauty
into dying beauty.
I always seem to miss it.
It must happen when I'm washing the dishes,
or singing the children's bedtime anthology,
or sorting the books into usable order--
sometimes remembering to try to be mindful,
sometimes remembering to try to be mindful,
to defer to the teachings.
Or maybe it was spoken this way into the primordial wind:
how it was to be,
this ministry of cut flowers.
this ministry of cut flowers.
That we should see not the apex of their decline
or their resistant throes,
or their resistant throes,
but only the exuberant stretching to sunlight,
the praise for fresh water--
and then, ineffably, the graceful surrender
of bowing leaves and drifting petals,
the easy disintegration of severed stems
into that fecund stew,
into that fecund stew,
breathing out low tide and high farmland
at once.
