There was a rose called Guy de Maupassant,

a carmine pink that smelled like a Granny Smith

and there was another from the seventeenth century

that wept too much and wilted when you looked;

and one that caused tuberculosis, doctors

dug them up, they wore white masks and posted

warnings in the windows. One wet day

it started to hail and pellets the size of snowballs

fell on the roses. It’s hard for me to look at

a Duchess of Windsor, it was worn by Franco

and Mussolini, it stabbed Jews; yesterday I bought

six roses from a Haitian on Lower Broadway;

he wrapped them in blue tissue paper, it was

starting to snow and both of us had on the wrong shoes,

though it was wind, he said, not snow that ruined

roses and all you had to do was hold them

against your chest. He had a ring on his pinky

the size of a grape and half his teeth were gone.

So I loved him and spoke to him in false Creole

for which he hugged me and enveloped me

in his camel hair coat with most of the buttons missing,

and we were brothers for life, we swore it in French.