Exit Bloom, Enter Bloom

[Written March third, this year.]

For days, in the mornings when studying Emerson, I looked at the last blooms on the Christmas cactus, and yearned to have pencil and paper at hand to draw what I saw — the fragile, warm-toned, and drooping bloom seen only partially, through the fern that sits nearer at hand — through its dark stems, its leaves capturing in green the northern window's morning light.

And now I see only the spent blossom — still, it is true, fragile, warm-toned, and drooping — there, barely, through rising stems and spreading leaves.

And now, too, with the cactus done, the begonia on the same table blooms.