Tequila Bottle With Gillyflowers

I have nothing against roses but their short life span.
Maybe that’s why romantics love them so.
They flame out quickly, like Shelley or Byron.
When I was 21 I wrote a poem starring
yellow roses and Melody Coker: “Terminalia.”
(Studying Rome, I was proud of the title
for the latinate irony my bitterness demanded.)
John Ciardi, in one of my favorites of his,
tells the story of 1,000 roses he picked up cheap,
then hauled to church to scatter around the nave
in anticipation of an ex- girlfriend’s wedding
to “steadiness.” (“What a fool!” “But what a gesture!”)
These flowers have a native toughness not often
spoken of, and belied by their genus’ gentle ring.
Put a little salt in the vase-water with them
and they’ll last a long time. They look at home
jammed into an empty tequila bottle, (imagine
doing that with a rose!) and who knows? They might
just thrive there, if only the way Humphrey Bogart
managed to survive on the streets of Tampico
until Walter Huston and Tim Holt came to town.