SOMETIMES ROSES—especially the velvety crimson ones, with red-bronze leaves—remind me of the 1980s, when I lived in New York City during the AIDS epidemic. They make me remember chaos and fear in connection with the symptoms—fevers, chills, headaches, diarrhea, swollen glands, muscular aches, fatigue, weight loss, thrush, insomnia, and the lesions, which, like Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter, bore a stigma.
But the neat, perfectly formed, soft-domed roses also remind me of hybrid vigor, or heterosis, a term used in genetics. Hybrid vigor hypothesizes that crossbred plants, animals, and humans are genetically superior to their parents, since weak, undesirable, deleterious, recessive genes, which might be harmful, are suppressed. Hybrid vigor can fortify a voluptuous rose’s seventy small petals against beetles and disease, just as it can fortify and strengthen a man or a woman against the effects of an incurable virus.
And sometimes, pressing my nose into the dark-crimson button eye of a rose, I think of Black Saturday and the weird, frightening stigmata of Christ. On Black Saturday, the day before Easter, the “Harrowing of Hell” is said to have occurred, and Jesus descended into the underworld to visit the realm of the dead and to rescue the good men and women held captive there, not unlike the poet Orpheus seeking his beloved Eurydice.
WHEN I WRITE about flowers, I think I am trying to find out what I really feel, so there are digressions and sometimes incoherence. But flowers open me up and smash the water that is frozen inside me. As John Ashbery says, “We are all confessional poets sometimes. That is, we sometimes write about our personal experiences. And there should be no stigma attached to this.” In French, the word rose (from the Latin rosa) means both the woody perennial and the color pink. In Elizabeth Bishop’s beautiful unpublished draft “Vague Poem,” she is smashed open, too, while playing with the confusion between rock roses and rose-rock quartz. The fragment concludes, euphorically, with an intimate and erotic chant affirming the female body:
Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,
clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,
rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,
exacting roses from the body,
and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex—
In these lines, the handsome rose-rock quartz merges in Bishop’s thoughts with pink rock roses, which then call to mind the desirable flesh of her beloved. Rock roses are showy flowers, with five petals crumpled in the bud. They are short-lived, bisexual, and solitary. There is rose imagery in other memorable Bishop poems, too. In “The Fish,” the brown skin of a caught fish is described as ancient wallpaper with “shapes like full-blown roses.” And in “Cirque d’Hiver,” about a mechanical toy circus horse, the little dancer on his back has “artificial roses” sewn across her skirt and bodice, and “Above her head she poses / another spray of artificial roses.” As the toy flits across the floor, the dancer’s body and soul are pierced again and again by a tiny pole, and the roses are an evocation of her femininity.
“Poetry bloweth where it listeth. It should never be thought of as a practical solution to life’s mess. Its value is in its total uselessness,” Ashbery has said. “It’s the roses we are always being urged to stop and smell.”
IN PARIS, during the early part of the nineteenth century, there was rosomania, resulting from the first wife of Napoleon, Joséphine, who was a passionate gardener. After she was replaced by a younger wife, who was of royal lineage and could give Napoleon an heir, Joséphine lived at the Château de Malmaison (House of Misfortune), seven miles west of central Paris, where she transformed the dilapidated estate’s plain surroundings into a glorious garden with more than two hundred varieties of roses. Plants were brought from England and China, and Joséphine’s enthusiasm was so infectious that between 1810 and 1830, roses reached the height of popularity and France became a center for their hybridization.
Even the way that roses develop their petals into blossoms was reconceived, and the flowers were induced to repeat-blossom many times in a season and last longer once they were cut and displayed in a vase. But after Joséphine’s death, at only fifty-one—from pneumonia, after a walk in her garden—Malmaison fell into decline, the grounds were sold off piecemeal, the roses dug up by thieves, and all the traces of the imperial garden vanished. Joséphine’s real name, in fact, was Rose, but Napoleon wanted her to have a more regal-sounding one. Though she lived with emus, black swans, sheep, gazelles, antelopes, and llamas at Malmaison, it is said she died of a broken heart.
WHAT STRANGE aphrodisiacal powers the roses at my local florist seem to have. With their deep cups and wide rosettes and vigorous upright branches and tight inner petals, I cannot resist bringing them home as often as I can afford them. In Keats’s long poem “Lamia,” written in 1819, about a boy looking for a girl and a girl looking for a boy, the darker side of truth and eroticism is explored with mild sadomasochistic pleasure. Lycius says to Lamia,
How to entangle, trammel up and snare
Your soul in mine, and labyrinth you there
Like the hid scent in an unbudded rose?
And in Louise Glück’s hauntingly inward collection The Wild Iris, a book of rapture, a white rose’s monologue touches on religious motifs of suffering, death, and resurrection. Observing humans in the distance, the white rose presents a little spiritual meditation:
All night the slender branches of the tree
shift and rustle at the bright window.
Explain my life to me, you who make no sign,
though I call out to you in the night:
I am not like you, I have only
my body for a voice; I can’t
disappear into silence—
(from “The White Rose”)
Glück is a lyric poet in the line of the metaphysical poets, like George Herbert, who also used flowers as images of the soul, and the poems in her book have a despairing, vatic power.
In Paris, each day I am aware of the presence of roses everywhere—in the dark red tips of the matchsticks I light the gas stove with, in the pretty pink blouse of my neighbor on the birdcage elevator, and in the soft hues of lampshades, illuminated in the windows at night across the street from where I live.
THE MOST-READ and most-translated book in the French language is The Little Prince, a poetic children’s story for adults by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry about a pilot, stranded in the desert, who meets a prince fallen from an asteroid. I read the book when I was a boy, looking up every word to understand its French meaning. In this idealistic tale, roses are a symbol of something good inside us that we must struggle to preserve because it is ephemeral, like a flame in a lamp that must be protected from the wind. Without this rose, we would be empty and no one would want us. Saint-Exupéry’s story teaches us that sometimes the things that are the most essential in life are invisible.
Each of us has a rose that must be nurtured. It is a symbol of the spirit in our bodies. We cannot make it up. It is not a habit. Crudely stated, without it we are merely perfected corpses. A poet at twenty is twenty. A poet at forty is a poet, Lord Byron said. But what is a poet later on in life? If language is the poet’s medium, its suggestive powers must be used together with the poet’s biological presence to make something pure, something more logical than deductive thought, something comprised of language without which we cannot seem to have lived.
Sometimes, I have the strange sense that my poems are like small bodies whose validity is without savor unless they can pierce the membrane of normal existence. Because the amount of poetry that dies away is enormous, I must risk failure while striving to make something new, an original kind of rose, perhaps, in the book of roses, which climbs, and is shapely, and durable, and fragrant, too.
