Not only did my husband bring me roses, he arranged them, tied bows around the vase, took a photo and gave me that, as well. They look a little disheveled, like they’re jockeying for position, while their stems slide along the bottom of the vase, causing them to tilt, scrunch or hang awkwardly out the side. I feel a little like this myself on a day-to-day basis trying to corral the items strewn across and piled upon my desk, tend to the phone calls, errands and chores that accumulate expoentially if I don’t line them up and knock them down regularly. Inevitably when I slack off, well, that’s when my feet start sliding, a deep fog rolls into my frontal lobe and the ascending piles begin to rock and then slither helter-skelter across the desktop or onto the floor, crashing down upon the smooth surfaces of my mental order. But, all good analogies have to end somewhere and unlike these roses, this disarray does not smell sweet to the nose, brush the cheek softly or light up a room with color. Telephone bills (no one just has "a" telephone bill anymore), grocery lists starting with beets and ending with toothpaste, and insurance claim forms to be submitted, rarely inspire poems, (although I can’t say they never have) and any tears shed over them will be surely be ones of frustration, not the sweet tenderness that rose petals evoke when strewn upon a path.

It’s been a week and they are still in their vase, having never fully opened, rusting around the edges and the water in the vase has gone murky. I will leave Monday for Florida and don’t have the heart to toss them. I’ll leave that to my husband. He brought them into our world. He can usher them out.

Here are a couple of "rose" poems taken off the web at Poets.org. (To see publications by these poets click on their names.)

Go, lovely rose!
by Edmund Waller

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
  
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

    Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
    That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

    Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
    Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

    Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
    May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

********

The Separate Rose: I
by Pablo Neruda
Translated by William O’Daly

Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.

Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.

You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.