Walking home

[radiantfracture]

Even in the rain, the cherry blossoms are luminous, though less distinct, like a vague cool glance from someone beautiful thinking of something else.

Their smell, though, coaxed loose by the precise and insistent raindrops, seems stronger and sweeter than on a bright day. Beyond the familiar peppery scent, something in them admits finally to being flowers.

There's a good cedary smell tonight, too, like a new fence, a young smell maybe also lifted up out of old wood and stain by the water's alchemy.

A fat black-and-white cat surges like a storm cloud into a foggy window, as if responding to me, but not looking at me.

There is a hole worn right through the concrete here, near the new sidewalk, showing through to the storm sewer like a wound.

This was a long day, and not a happy one, but these small witnessings are more than compensation; they are a clear rain that drives the ugly fragments into the gutter, down the drain, out into the great night-soaked ocean.

Though sometime I may have to retrieve and make sense of them, right now I am just grateful for a small clear space.

{rf}

Comments

[larryhammer]

This seems to be a good day for Housman all over my f-lists:


Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.