In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

White Mind and Roses Nobody's (not Rilke's even, whose shade doesn't sleep), they are all their own (are they a they?—this shameless abundance that grows most in the whirlpools of its smell, till the whole rosebush was never green, and memory's a moving ground, for famous white explosions, flashpoints of tissue and powers to die). The blooming itself is a kind of time, a summerful of outburst, or collective noun; but the trained eye notes what few could wish to emulate: the fate of the individual, that quickest course in explicated radiance. Each rose is both the lover and the source of light, seizer and liberator of the lunary zones in men. Having done its utmost by inventing us, with our rose-loving eyes and noses—having over-done it, wasted billions on an animal that sees the flowerer but not the flow— and having finally grown rich beyond the registers of narrow rubric—then the bloom begins to turn: subtly at first, only a hint of yellow (barely betraying selves to itself); then suddenly there's brown all over, petal upon leaf and leaf upon the stinging wood (once fraught with whitest pyrotechnic, now ubiquitously dark, it's no less rose). Was it the whole we were so busily admiring, when we missed 43 the sharp particulars (the hurtful ones, the quick)? The whole has its own bed and bud and root and rot, and they went unremarked as well (how much goes on beneath our notice, being being what it is). It's hard to tell. The darks exist that could undo our ignorance, as days undid our sense (sense in the singular, that idee fixe whose urge is mainly to ouxdo the other, shifting five) . . . But can a dark undo our dread? When we're asleep is there a murderer at large? What passes all day for our ghost, at night is it otherwise? Inside is it red? 44 ...

Share