Three Flowers

On a walk around my neighborhood today
I took a route I usually don’t take.
On this walk I passed a house I had never seen
or maybe just never noticed.

Its pale yellow paint was peeling;
the space inside the dirty cracked windows
was dark, empty.

The front yard was a quiet cluster
of hay-colored grass and weeds
but in this muted mass there were
three vibrant flowers near the road,
two of them the pink of drugstore lipstick
and the third the reddish purple of a wine-stained smile.

I eagerly pulled all three
off of their slender twisting vines
and turned to continue on my walk

but I felt suddenly that the house had
seen what I had done
its half-shaded windows like sleepy eyes roused from a dream

looking at me
a stranger to this street
who hadn’t considered for even the shortest moment
that someone else before her
had seen those flowers
had wanted them there
someone else might be returning home to find
the flowers they had been admiring
perhaps for weeks
were gone.

I told myself I had a good use for these flowers
I would draw them or replant them
I told myself this was a higher purpose
than leaving them where they were.

But by the time I walked the mile or so
home

all three flowers had wilted.