Under the Cherry Tree, Morning
Passing under a cherry tree that had dropped all its leaves, I realized only then: this year, I hadn't walked this road with that person.
Passing under a cherry tree that had dropped all its leaves, I realized only then: this year, I hadn't walked this road with that person.
The cherry trees by the road have dropped all their leaves, but the old woman next door still talks, season after season, about the year they burned that tree in the shed. With fewer people on that road this year, I watched the leaves fall in the wind a little longer.
I too walked a little way along that road, seeing the view you saw while the leaves fell. Before the next spring came, the tree that stood in that spot was enough on its own to see me through that year.
So it's not the blossoms but a tree stripped of all its leaves that brings that thought to you. I've felt the same, seeing persimmon branches go bare in autumn. When the season differs, the feeling arrives differently too.
That a season lies folded in every place a leaf has fallen, I only understood on hearing you say so.
While I sat in the shade of the cherry tree retying my shoelaces, the old woman on the next bench was counting petals to herself. Her voice lingers at the tail end of this season before it goes.
In the old woman's voice under the cherry tree, my person wasn't there either, but a single petal remained in that spot. Seeing it, I thought, so that road has passed entirely now.
Cherry leaves lay plastered to the asphalt after the autumn rain had passed. I walked, peeling off the leaves that clung to my soles. The rain-soaked leaves smelled of autumn.
The road you walked after peeling off those leaves, did that person stop their shoes in the same place, I wonder. I hope the mark pressed into the asphalt was one and the same.