Duluk's "December Rose" begins by turning its back on the world. "nevermind the lofty faces that you meet," the opening couplet says, brushing aside the people we nod to "quickly on the street," the hurried politeness of public life. In their place comes something private and sensory: a lover remembered through small physical details, followed by a second section that shows where the memory has left the speaker. The poem is about how intimacy lingers after it has begun to fail, and how remembered warmth can make the present feel colder.
The memory opens in a garden before any person appears. A yellow-jacket performs "the dance of the... ritual / around the nipples of the honey-suckle stems." "Dance" and "ritual" suggest courtship, and "nipples" blurs plant and body, so the natural world is already erotic before the woman enters. Then come the human details: "her pants would lie beside your bed," "her leg around your waist, arm across your chest." The little word "would" matters. It is the grammar of habit, of something that used to happen and no longer does. The birds sing "well past breakfast," a loose, unhurried morning. But the memory carries its own shadow. The woman is a "plaintive face staring out your window / and sighing - for another breath to relieve her of / the strain from more uncertainty." That sentence runs across three lines like the sigh it describes, and "more" implies she already had plenty. Even the happiest recollection contains the end of the affair.
The form follows the same drift from order to looseness. The poem starts with a tidy rhyme, "meet" and "street," then drops rhyme altogether and settles into free verse with uneven lines and almost no punctuation. The four-dot ellipsis in "recall....the dance" reads like a pause to shut one's eyes. Part I is addressed to "you," and judging by the commands ("nevermind," "recall," "recall"), the speaker may be coaching himself. That makes the switch to "I" in Part II the poem's hinge, the moment the distance of memory collapses into confession.
Part II gives us a present scene, and it is built from the same unsteadiness. The speaker stands "below the afternoon bridges, under / a street-lamp flickering and unstable." The lamp is uncertainty made visible, and the time quietly slides from afternoon to dusk. The sunset "recline[s] into a cloudy chamber of forgotten repose," borrowing the vocabulary of the bedroom (recline, chamber, repose) from Part I, but now the repose is "forgotten." The long vowels and soft sibilants of "swallow the crisp dusk air" slow the line down, and "swallow" hints at things held back.
Then the poem does something unexpected. "she returns a letter / written by her abstruse young friend - / (my irreverent brother)." The parenthesis, indented and set apart, is like an aside muttered under the breath, and it adds a complication the poem refuses to explain. "Abstruse" and "irreverent" are brisk, slightly sour labels. The returned letter might mark a closing of accounts, though that is an inference, since the poem never says why it is handed back.
The closing lines look back at "when the seasons were less cruel: / but forgiving in quiet December evening snows; / when the mornings were less forced: / resolving themselves in capitulated scenarios." The key word is "less." The past was not perfect, only less cruel and less forced, so the trouble was there from the start. The mornings also answer the earlier birds-and-breakfast scene. Once they were open and unplanned, and now they feel compelled. "Capitulated scenarios" is cold, abstract language, the vocabulary of surrender and negotiation, set against the honeysuckle. It hints that harmony came through giving in. The poem ends with no full stop, leaving everything unresolved.
The title names what the poem never shows. There is no rose in it, only honeysuckle and snow. A rose in December is a bloom out of season, beautiful and endangered, and that seems to be the love the poem describes, or perhaps the memory that keeps flowering in the wrong weather. The poem's quiet strength lies in its restraint. It never says the relationship has ended or who is to blame. A flickering lamp, a returned letter and a handful of mornings carry the feeling instead. It is a good poem for seeing how tense, pronoun and rhyme can do the work of explanation.