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Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Page 3
Mixed Tulips
Infant-skinned, crayon-hued tulips,
carried home with Sunday’s heavy news-
paper, bobbing jostled buds
in bright silk dresses, in communion-white tulle,
you hardly make a fuss
held up in a green glass vase.
One glows red as a clown’s nose and one’s
small and pink as a doll’s teacup, but
you are by origin Ottoman,
tulips, you are the folded turbans
enwrapping the mind of the tulip god.
As you open I find the curved chambers
in which I would like to be carried from this world.
Drawn-petal-curtained rooms,
gathered in the grass-green vase,
a mansion of blooms faced out
toward the doorway, unfurling your flavors
more and more to the bright day.
You taste of earth’s secrets—
what beetle has rested in you?
What upright souls do you offer
like hatpins from a great aunt’s purse?
Soon, soon you will bend
and perform your Salome act,
unloosing your rainbow of veils.
The ruffled yellow slips will fall
and the regal purple sleeves will
peel off one by one by one.
Oh tulips, you make grand company.
Who will throw you out at the end,
pick up your petals like severed tongues
from the shelf, dab the golden pollen
that was your final excretion?
Who having outlived a few bright flowers,
who able to let go of connections to the past?
For surely we tire though we must not,
having breathed the godly air of tulips
to the last.
Is it only to be dreamed—to be borne
from this world inside a sanctuary of tulip,
red, pink, yellow, purple, white or whiter white?
from Burning of the Three Fires, © 2010 by Jeanne Marie Beaumont. All rights reserved |