Gillian Osborne
Poem With Oratory and Roses
Unlike a catastrophe, a rose—
its ahistorical petals—
not an interruption in an office
where a woman is making notes
toward the smell of onions by an open window
where another woman is making
space apart from anguish or family
for anticipation, or humidity.
A rose grows.
1.
Between seer and seen
anthropologist and hunter
giver and the given
a blob of emollient color
5.
The petals of the family
are irregular in number
2.
A rose referring to other roses
More often than not
Feminized and prickling
As a lover references the hunt of bodies for a body
Giving in or changing
If a rose refers to loving
opening, suspended in the interrupting dash
Dear one, dearest –
Taking this second to tell you how suspicious I am
of rhetoric, promises, compromises, or the symphonic ending.
Ditto narrative, that says it goes
and goes. A rose, a pause in the pattern of forgetting.
Some time later, a gentle interruption
in the inorganic order of the poem
dipping into the platonic
That we cannot accept a world of forms is obvious
It would be all spheres there and god, deigning
But if there were a world of pure formalness
It would be
siphoned from longing
all surface, which is suggestion
which is action towards
a forming absence
which makes us duplicate
radiating loneliness
ordered and erotic—
When I left
I left you
a rose
in the space of a body
pink as a finger
gentle as a slipper
though by now
you should know
roses are also
lonely glories
And loneliness refrains.
Poem With Oratory and Roses
Unlike a catastrophe, a rose—
its ahistorical petals—
not an interruption in an office
where a woman is making notes
toward the smell of onions by an open window
where another woman is making
space apart from anguish or family
for anticipation, or humidity.
A rose grows.
1.
Between seer and seen
anthropologist and hunter
giver and the given
a blob of emollient color
5.
The petals of the family
are irregular in number
2.
A rose referring to other roses
More often than not
Feminized and prickling
As a lover references the hunt of bodies for a body
Giving in or changing
If a rose refers to loving
opening, suspended in the interrupting dash
Dear one, dearest –
Taking this second to tell you how suspicious I am
of rhetoric, promises, compromises, or the symphonic ending.
Ditto narrative, that says it goes
and goes. A rose, a pause in the pattern of forgetting.
Some time later, a gentle interruption
in the inorganic order of the poem
dipping into the platonic
That we cannot accept a world of forms is obvious
It would be all spheres there and god, deigning
But if there were a world of pure formalness
It would be
siphoned from longing
all surface, which is suggestion
which is action towards
a forming absence
which makes us duplicate
radiating loneliness
ordered and erotic—
When I left
I left you
a rose
in the space of a body
pink as a finger
gentle as a slipper
though by now
you should know
roses are also
lonely glories
And loneliness refrains.
Gillian Osborne is a writer, educator, and aspirational gardener based in California. She has published poems, essays, and reviews, and is the co-editor of a collection of scholarship on ecopoetics. She is at work on several books, including an account of ornamental gardening in times of environmental disaster.