Chrysanthemums

I sat watching the river early this morning. A great blue heron and I shared the slanting arrows of rain. They entered silent and quick as slivers, breaking the skin of the slough. The bird was concentrating all its stillness on what lay beneath the silted tide.
Myself, I was transfixed with fire. Cacophony of chrysanthemums, long stems bearing their spiked crowns aloft, shining chrome yellow, crimson, and traffic cone bright. A corolla of flames rising between slate sky and water bleak as zinc. Somebody had left a bouquet in a plastic Schweppes tonic bottle carefully cut and tied with a strand of twined wool, white and blue fastened to a bench overlooking the Fraser. Rain dark as a beaten shield falling around this golden shrine, alight, luminous as fireworks bursting in the gray cataract of the morning.
Sometimes, I think I'll go blind from the looking. The eye longs to draw its dark curtain across the unthinkable. We strain toward the invisible, hungering for some shape of beauty, the flash of light to feed us, the one thread binding us to the center of things. We lose sight of eternity when all the time it burns bright as an ember inside us. See here, the dark cerement of earth and sky alive, this offfering of fiery petals more brilliant than any pyre.
I wanted to return with a splash of gin, to dissolve my witness into the pure tonic collected in memory of the dead. To honour the way one tender gesture can for a moment return them alive to us. But I lingered, and oh the glory to see the heron unfold its wings. Silent angel rising. The river flowing serene. Blades of marsh grass were swaying, gently bending in memory of her passing.