Rose The rose is obsolete but each petal ends in an edge, the double facet cementing the grooved columns of air--The edge cuts without cutting meets--nothing--renews itself in metal or porcelain-- whither? It ends-- But if it ends the start is begun so that to engage roses becomes a geometry-- Sharper, neater, more cutting figured in majolica-- the broken plate glazed with a rose Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses-- The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end--of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits Crisp, worked to defeat laboredness--fragile plucked, moist, half-raised cold, precise, touching What The place between the petal's edge and the From the petal's edge a line starts that being of steel infinitely fine, infinitely rigid penetrates the Milky Way without contact--lifting from it--neither hanging nor pushing-- The fragility of the flower unbruised penetrates space William Carlos Williams
Spring and All (1923) [and 1533]

Apples, Roses, Fire, Snow, Medlars, Chestnuts, Tangerine
Jacques le Moyne de Morgues (c. 1533–1588)
Snow
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes –
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands –
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
Louis MacNeice (September 1907 – September 1963)
For my mother

This, Our Hour
Henri Fantin-Latour (1836 – 1904)
Rose enthroned, known to antiquity,
as a ringed calyx of small complexity;
to us you are the fulsome infinity
of bloom, the inexhaustible entity.
You appear as garment upon rich garment
clothing a body of nothing but light;
yet your single leaf is both estrangement
and renunciation of such an insight.
Across the centuries your sweetest names
have drifted down to us like soft perfume.
Suddenly it hangs in the air like fame.
Even so, we don’t know what to call it, we infer. . .
And, reaching toward it, memory subsumes
all which we have pleaded for in this, our hour.
from the Sonnets to Orpheus,
by Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Cliff Crego)
