By RU FREEMAN
Eudora writes to William about roses
Mr. Hennessey’s Gloire Dijon
Beauty of Glazenwood found
on the sides of barns its yellow
flaked with red caught only
from the windows of passing trains
& he to her as well of scented posies
Lady Hillingdon ascending
somewhere down a Paris street
the fragrant double petaled
Gruss an Aachen pluming with its
rosettes Hard to grow with cuttings
mailed back and forth like their letters
My father calls to tell me the news
The lemon tree is dead She was not
meant to live in his tropical island
She’d left her home there in Amalfi
where her pungent citrine skin showed off
against the Tyrrhenian Sea his
cut glass blue coat flirting flashes
of white fur still & un-still
William’s Irish roses have not arrived
honorably in the diplomatic pouch
Eudora suggests Mr. Maxwell considers
the gift of an Aquascutum for the willing
ship captain scheduled to arrive in winter
To hide the saplings Ms. Welty means
Like the friend who docked in rain
her pockets puffed with bonemeal soil
My loot came whole She preferred to travel
Fabergé style her fibrous cave a perfect clasp
and all the hermaphrodites within it singing
That’s how I like to think they were
those seeds their hope their journey
to America not unlike mine mysterious &
foreordained Their journey through Jaipur
back to the island similarly impossible
I should have planted more of those seeds
My father says and slips a thorn at a female
relative to him anyway I fail to laugh
He burrows further into his stories of won wars
the thieves he brought to justice or should have
Where his friends are now incontinent like him
a-brim with their barracuda stories those
sharp toothed years their toothless smiles
I slip like him a finger awaiting my return
to their book their tales of struggle With plants
with bread with writing for The New Yorker
I slip into the rose bushes my mother planted
Their unknown names her unknown longing
The things we hurry to say before we go
The way we want to stay everything
flowers robbery history us
Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American novelist and poet whose work appears internationally. She is the author most recently of Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship, and a Creative Life and Sleeping Alone: Stories. She is the editor of the anthology Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine.
