Arranging flowers

You’re arranging flowers

the same way each day

getting lost in the art

– you always ask me because

you always forget it’s ikebana

– but you remember the legend

of the tamatebako

I made for you, 

and keep it on the shelf

with your favourite books

on the verandah

your hunched silhouette

– the chaos of time within

briefly made visible

in the slowness of your gait –

you seem inert almost

but you are bustling:

vivid hands dusting leaves

nails nipping dead buds

and withered petals

surgically so

whispering to each plant

telling them they’re home

the water holding in the plates

only thanks to surface tension

is somehow like you

– come to think of it,

you’re the plate

and the plant –

briefly you look outside

hand like a visor

the rising sun flooding

the warming room –

the clouds seems to be pushed

by an invisible hand

– it’s the tide, you say,

it pushes the rain inland –

I know at this moment

a memory is being made

– I relished it then –

– fondly recall it now –

sitting in the empty verandah,

the flowers and plants

withered in dry, flaky plates

and cracked, ashen soil.