Bouquet of chrysanthemums with rain.

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Bouquet of Chrysanthemums with Rain

The chrysanthemums were having a meeting with the rain.

This was happening in a garden behind a house that had forgotten why it had been built. The house stood there anyway, with its windows looking into the trees and its doors leading nowhere particularly important.

The chrysanthemums were enormous.

Each flower had hundreds of thin white fingers curled toward a yellow center, as if the flowers were trying to remember how to hold something they had never seen.

Rain fell through them.

It collected on the petals in little silver beads, then rolled downward until it reached the tips and fell again.

Rain was very good at leaving.

I watched a girl standing beneath the flowers.

She wore a striped dress that seemed to have been made from the shadows of a small fence. She reached upward and touched one of the chrysanthemums.

The flower moved.

The whole bouquet moved.

For a moment I thought the garden was breathing.

Then I thought perhaps I was the one breathing.

This was inconvenient because I had spent most of the morning believing I was a chair.

It had been a pleasant morning.

Chairs have very few responsibilities.

A chair waits.

A chair supports.

A chair occasionally becomes a ladder when nobody is looking.

The girl looked at the flower and smiled.

A drop of rain fell from a petal onto her forehead.

It stayed there.

Perhaps it had decided to become a thought.

I have always liked thoughts that begin as water.

They seem more honest.

A thought made of water does not pretend to know where it is going. It runs down the face. It enters the mouth. It disappears into the shirt. It becomes part of the afternoon.

The chrysanthemums continued holding their enormous conversation with the sky.

Somewhere beyond the garden a train was passing.

I could not see it.

I could hear its long metallic sentence moving through the trees.

The sound reminded me of a spoon falling into an empty kitchen.

Then I remembered the spoon.

It was an old spoon.

It had belonged to someone who had once believed that spoons were important.

This is how gardens work.

You enter looking at flowers.

You leave carrying a spoon.

The girl reached higher.

Behind her, the rain made the green leaves shine.

The chrysanthemums leaned toward her as if they had finally decided what they wanted.

Perhaps they wanted to be picked.

Perhaps they wanted to remain exactly where they were.

Perhaps flowers have the same problem we do.

They spend their entire lives becoming beautiful enough to disappear.

The rain kept falling.