Actually, I cannot offer you roses.  Roses that taste like crystallized desire when you try to smell them.  Roses whose buds are softer than the hands of the morning mist.  Roses pierced through by the needles of nightfall.

Roses that count the season’s clock with their petals, disrobing red by red until all’s gone except the sun’s winter angles.  Roses growing in walls around the wells of your heart.  Roses crowding the boundaries of your cards until every shuffle is a procession of brambles.

Roses laid upon the swelling waters to be swallowed by black tides.  Roses that candy themselves as they pass your lips.  Roses so shy you can only glimpse their shadows as you fall asleep.

I would rather give you roses than a bouquet of words, but I do not speak the petal language adequately and it does not admit translation; this will have to suffice.

for Nancy Sauer