Just looking

I rush about sloshing
variously sized buckets
of smelly, sludge grained water
one into another as I remember
we did in a primary school maths lesson,
make stacks of teetering black pillars.
In the bottoms of some lurk rosebuds
filmy with slime, or translucent
greening chrysanthemums.
If I look up spotlights meet my eyes
with a glare - they know their duty -
make the flowers look beautifully
buyable, un walk by able.
Next week today all this
will be blood red for Valentine's,
hundreds of identical bouquets
each bought for someone unique.
Men with tired eyes on the way home
from work stop. Some grab the nicest
then wince seeing the price :
put them back, go for the next size down.
(Red roses really are more expensive
for this one week of the year.
I imagine greenhouses full of crimson;
there is something fascist about them:
every, long prim stem
topped with a fakely perfect bloom.)
Some men can afford the best
and buy without looking; others
spend ages picking out colours,
shapes, scents from memories
of preference or hope maybe
of showing love, not enslavement
to commercial pressure. As I
turn, clutching a bucket of lilies
tight buds pointed as lizzardheads
I see an old lady touching
the petals of a pink rose, very gently
with her fingertip, and her face
is so wistful. She notices me watching -
embarrassed, I smile and she smiles back, but the look in her
eyes
makes me want to cry. She sighs,
drops her hand. "My husband
used to buy me pink roses
every Valentines"

And my heart wrenches
as she leans forward, searching
for the scent, as of course there's none:
people want things to last nowadays
and flowers can't do both. She reaches out again, this time for the
price
which is never elusive, flinches.
"I was just looking" she says,
and walks away. And I want
to just give them to her but
what she wants is the scent of love
and I think, I think she is so lucky
to have known it even though it's past