A Bunch of Chrysanthemums
Through the bus window on the way to work, I saw a street vendor holding a bunch of chrysanthemums, waiting for someone to take them. The hands carrying those chrysanthemums overlap, just as they were, with the gray waves of the winter sea here. Sitting by the window at dawn with my coffee, I think of how those hands must have passed through the morning of some alley. The bus went straight on, and in that spot only the wind remained, scattering petals. Now I tuck that morning into the pocket of memory, and listen out the window to the sound of the tide coming in.
On a summer night in the alley, beside a woman smoking, a plastic bag at her slippered feet gave off the scent of chrysanthemums. From the main road the sound of passing cars was pushed far away. That scent had the same grain as a morning by the water.
The sound of the winter tide coming in lands in the same place as the cars passing in a summer-night alley. The chrysanthemum scent in that plastic bag seems to drift on the sea wind all the way to this window.
I once saw the warmth of a vendor's fingertips seep out through the plastic where her hand had wrapped the flower stems. At that hour I was sitting not on a bus but by the crock stand, and the chrysanthemum scent drifted off while only hands making soy sauce came to mind. Now, before the sound of the waves comes in through the window, the alley those hands brushed must still be dark.
In the darkness of that alley, I can almost hear the lid of a soy sauce crock being lifted. Following that sound, instead of the chrysanthemums, I keep in memory the dew gathered on the rim of the crock.