Outside the firehouse on this windy Sunday morning,
a man is headed to his car, a pot of lilies in his arms.
I didn’t see him peruse the Easter tagsale table inside,
don’t know how he came to choose the white trumpets
over hyacinths, daffodils wide-faced and peeking
from the darkened bay. Was he headed out
for the Sunday paper, only to unexpectedly
come across the help-the-homeless sale? Maybe he always
buys lilies from the mustached, tattooed fireman
now making change for the woman in heels, a child
in her arms, their backs to me. My face is to the sun
as the man drives off, lilies resting perhaps
in his back seat, beside the newspaper. The woman,
her child, both gone into the shadowed bay as I pass first
the firehouse and then the babbling brook. Remembering
now how apples and gold leaves fell, scattering,
and wondering where are they under the budding lilacs?
Perhaps the man will rest his lilies in a cemetery
near a wood guarded by fern. Or, maybe place
them beside a chocolate rabbit in a basket
in a kitchen not far from mine.
Will there be music playing as he rises
to slice the ham soon to be passed alongside
roasted asparagus?
A moment of prayer, please, for my own pink basket
resurrected from the attic, for the scalloped potatoes
still simmering in this bowl. And while we’re at it,
a little reverence for the farmer who, months ago,
walked his field, considering when to plant the bulbs
that somehow would bloom this very day.