The rose at the edge of my tax structure
sways in the breeze before twilight.
Ribbons of a scent that snares me
whorl from it. I imagine I see them.
Like spirals flowing from Venetian glass.
It is an air like glass I sit to.
Need it be real to be real enough?
How real are angels? -yet Vaticans
have bedrocked on an air they stirred. As I
have ground my hands black, even bled a little,
to turn a fantasy of a sort: the bed
is weeded, pruned, mulched, watered.
I have paid the taxes on it. Roses
are not for nothing. I have done
what pleased me painfully. Now I sit
happy to look at what I look at.
When has a rose been looked at enough?
A petal can be a shell of lemon
marked at the hinges like a pitted peach
thumbed open warm from the tree,
but veined paler. What an intricate
precision it takes to call a bee,
another and another intricacy veining
to the heart of the rose—the “yellow”
as Dante knew it before hybridizers
stained some strains red to the core,
though pinks and whites still wash to a yellow center.
In being intricate nature is pliable.
By growing intricate enough I may yet
come to see what I look at.
It is not easy. It is better than easy:
it is joyously difficult. It is never
what one expected before looking. Tomorrow
I must spray for aphids before they come,
and pay the Lawn Shop something on account.
Are accounts an offense to nature? With my hand
I can reach six inches into the soil of that bed.
That is not nature, but makes roses. By frost time
the tree rose must be burlaped and laid flat,
half its roots folded, the other half let loose,
then buried again in moss and old compost,
hay, if I can find it (which I doubt),
and then more burlap (which I have not yet paid for).
But the grafts have taken. They should bear next year
four colored from one stem. If that,
as I believe, is a loveliness, and not
mere ingenuity of contrivance
(which it is, of course, but still lovely),
it is budgeted for a grafting knife, tape, wax,
cans of Miracle-Gro, a sprayer, sprays.
Add what the root stock cost me: a time ago
I ate for a semester on something less
than a rose comes to. Not that price matters.
Until you haven’t got it. I still have
and note it to pay gladly for what I buy,
wanting it more than what I spend.
As I read catalogues for their complications.
It is not simplicity I am waiting to see
but the rose that will not come easy
and that must be painstaken beyond nature.
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