— Where are we with flowers these days? They’ll never stop blooming. Rilke wrote 24 poems on the rose. The flowers continue to dream us even when their beauty is too delicate for us in this ravaged world. Sometimes flowers come with cigarettes. The poets will not be done with flowers. Nor the painters. They’ll show how ugly they are, too, in the poems these days. The way they decay or how they look when they’ve fallen to the pavement and been trodden upon over and over. — The flowers in poems will be exhausted or fresh or touched by...