So I put them in the sink, for the cool porcelain was tender, and took out the tattered and cut each stem on a slant, trimmed the black and raggy leaves, and set them all— roses, delphiniums, daisies, iris, lilies, and more whose names I don’t know, in bright new water— gave them a bounce upward at the end to let them take their own choice of position, the wheels, the spurs, the little sheds of the buds. It took, to do this, perhaps fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of music with nothing playing.
