Red Flowers in a Vase

Morning came and went somewhere, like it walked up wearing a sparkling dress and said hello but left again.  It was a glistening morning, emerging brightly after the spitting gray storm that left in the night.

I sipped my coffee at the table and contemplated a vase with flowers.  It is a gently curving clear glass, with water pierced by emerald stems.  My mind brushed itself along the petals, poured their fragrance into all the hollows and valleys of memory and experience.  They spoke to me quietly in claret, blood-red crimson and scarlet, enfolding me in their velvet arms.  All the color was singing silently, moving everywhere like love, glowing like a sacred vow.

Out in the shine of the day, redness pursued me, haunted me and shouted out its glories.  Color was running in clouds in the streets, climbing to the treetops and bounding across the Gabilans, all the way to heaven.  Redness everywhere, all shades of it, sleek, shining, beaming, vital and eternal, recalled the redness of silent, tender flowers in a clear glass vase.

The sky has shifted from vigilant brilliant blue to a quiet rustle of silver organza strewn from Bonnie Doon to the Ventana and beyond.  Sounds of life in town are distant, wrapped in cotton quilts, listening in the streets and alleys for echoes, tapping on the fence posts.  Time is lying on the window sill, yawning and stretching languidly, idly thinking of promises and answers, keeping many secrets.

Refreshed by the passing brilliant day, twilight is striding in, cloaked in a soft grey wool, checking the windows for drafts, the lamps for light and the sky for stars.  Tenderly, it pauses at the vase and gently caresses the flowers, covers them in grey, then black, and then hushes them to sleep their deep crimson dreams.