The Maynard
Fall 2018

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Tulips for Barbara

I am watching the petals of these hot-house tulips, cupped
fans slightly translucent in the light from an overhead lamp in my
dining room, and I find myself thinking about the curves of your
lips when you dance over a self-deprecating remark with something
sideways to a smile, and I hope you aren’t drinking too much, that
you have money in your bank account and a clean bathroom, that
the muse hasn’t torn up your carpeting and lit out on the back of
some jerk’s Harley-Davidson.
Why the yellow tulips, which are past their upright peak and starting
to flex open like six-pointed, flower-shaped stars (each one brushed
with apricot-pink along the central vein) should remind me of you,
I can’t say. I wonder if it’s the time of night or sitting alone that
brings you to mind and not the flowers, with their faint green-y
scent, at all. But then the anthers are so dark, a deep glistening brown,
and I think of your eyes by firelight and how I was young once,
by firelight, flames about the color of the tulips making my body
bright in the darkness. Earth and ash.
What has occurred here in the past few minutes, time I’ve spent
gazing at tulips and thinking of you, is somehow capacious,
expansive, like sky over the plains states where the whole idea of
negative and positive space ceases to be meaningful, and Keats’
refusal of our irritable facts abuts the edge of the table, and gravity
holds the potted bulbs in place so I can look at three blooms lit
by the memory of your face, laughing.