Three red, one white, one purple, one yellow, one pink.
Seven roses in a jar on the kitchen table, the morning
paper, Kona coffee, a plate of sliced melon and banana.
I’m in a fogbank. I was out wandering the keeps
of some mind or another far too late. Now all I can do
is stare at the roses, which smell wonderful, as does
the fruit, as does the coffee. The truth about life is
that it is good, but it comes with a lot of string attached.
The rosebushes were here when we bought
this house, though we have added to them, subtracted
from them. Frankly, I don’t like them much. They
demand so much of you. They want to be fertilized
and prune and mulched. Then they get sick, they
get rusty and moldy, and things live in them and you
must resort to despicable substances, you have to
wear yellow gloves. All that time out in the heat
when you could be bodysurfing or reading a book.
If I were Rumi I could make a parable about the roses,
I could dance into a fainting spell and someone on my staff
would write down the poem I uttered, or if I were Francis Ponge
I coudl study the roses in a way that a cubist might,
just before painting them all up and down a stretched canvas.
I’ve looked at the hard truh: that my heart might be just
too dark for roses. Or my soul too weary. Or my mind
too confused. Yet they are beautiful here in their cut
ripeness, their delicate bowing to the earth. See how the air
beads into water all along the jar. And the white rose,
its delicate, almost invisible kiss of red at the edges of
its inner petals. It is all so strange in the morning when
I cannot think, and when my body at rest wishes to remain
at rest, which is the law, after all. I know it’s the way
of the world that the roses and I have so much to do
with one another. It’s one hand washing the other hand.
It’s morning, and I take to the day slowly, grow
into my senses slowly. And maybe the roses puzzle after me in
their fashion, the seven lovely roses sitting on my table,
scenting the sunlit room. Maybe they know that I know
how they hate the way they are softly, softly dying for me.
-Frank X. Gaspar
