KAREN VOLKMAN
Tulips
Immoderation
is the seasonal edict: tulips spike from the earth with the
force of the righteous, fist-sized,
uncompromising, unforgiving, barely natural ("the homespun surreal," I
wrote my friend, "like David Lynch") on prim lawns the leisurely
envisioned for springtime. Note: seasons have meaning where the
temperature changes (it is fresh life from sludge, it is renewal, it is
strategic) -
these tulips aren't scribbles studded in notebooks, not crazy color on a
ballerina spine,
they are burgeoned and blazoned , the pure indiscretion (for lack of
restraint is the seasonal
jazz),
are turbines and toxins . Zany. Malign. Are the clown's painted Bozo
mouth on white foundation .
While at the backyard barbecue,
I
watched a man show a woman the
fragile tulip innards
(the two might have been lovers) like one flower inside of another, so
he
said, and talk swayed
to the intrusion of deer in the suburbs, those devout tulip-eaters, the
hunted at prey - as the sun creaked down over houses,
over apartments with their boxes of perfect
fal/x
tulips (for self-deception
is the seasonal fashion, I am told), over the highway
with its lone deer sprawled on the curbside ("the usual complications,
usual hungers, usual roles"),
and over the balcony of the handsome restaurant downtown,
where two ceramic tulips posed austerely, careful, cold (you would not
believe the science when he kissed me),
that must have been empty, that must have held nothing at all.
