Running is one of the few things you have to do alone;
But today Jackie I’m finishing the full distance of the Valentine for you—
A night of (not so) secret signs and lullabies… (Sharon. Smirk— I am still going to hell, aren’t I ? Both were great).
Unexplored Memory;
Near just around the start of last year, when I lost someone in the storm, on my walks during that time I’d noticed the power plant stacks over by Dana-Farber.
During a truly frozen evening, and late last night in the 20’s was not enough, this winter being milder, the plumes turn straight to clouds of ice billowing in the air.
And the sight of two stars I’ve been unable to identify…
Interlaced among delicate memories of what must be the sketchiest second-hand bookstore bathroom, anywhere, ever (another great ‘first-date’ spot), last night was possibly the first time I ever bought a book based on the description of the jacket/cover.
It reads:
“The Tulip is not a gardening book. It is the story of a flower that has made men mad. Greed, desire, anguish, devotion have all played their part in the development of the tulip from a wild flower of the Asian steppes to the world-wide phenomenon it is today. The US alone imports three thousand million tulip bulbs each year, Germany and France even more.
Why did the tulip dominate so many lives through so many centuries in so many countries? The author, a self-confessed tulipomaniac, has spent six years looking for answers. No other flower has ever carried so much cultural baggage; it charts political upheavals, illuminates social behaviour, mirrors economic booms and busts, plots the ebb and flow of religious persecution.
The tulip made great fortunes for people but was responsible for equally spectacular bankruptcies. Millions of aficionados now gaze in awe at the brilliant flower pieces painted in the early seventeenth century by masters such as Ambrosius Bosschaert. But at the time they were painted, these works of art were considered as cheap substitutes for the real flowers. Even Jan van Huysum, the grand master of Dutch flower painting, could rarely command more than 5,000 guilders for a painting. But at an auction in Alkmaar, Holland in 1637, a single bulb of the red-and-white tulip ‘Admiral Lieffkens’ changed hands for 4,400 guilders.
Roaming through Asia, India, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the author tells how the tulip arrived from Turkey and took the whole of Western Europe by storm. In the petals of the exquisite English Florists’ tulips, still exhibited in competition by members of the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society in Yorkshire, runs the blood of flowers first grown by John Evelyn in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Sumptuously illustrated from a wide range of sources, the book also features descriptions of eighty wild-species tulips and several hundred garden varieties. This beautifully produced and irresistible volume will become a bible, a unique source book, a universal gift book and a joy to all who possess it.”
Honestly,
I couldn’t have said it better myself—
Chinatown, Boston
In your garden.
“The Parrot or Dragon tulips are well named, for some of them really do suggest the more gaudy macaws in their coloring, and the jagged edges of their petals always remind me of the wyvern, that winged heraldic cousin of the dragon. I tried this comparison on a gardening friend, who started at me blankly and said she couldn’t think what I meant, and what was a wyvern anyhow? But still I think that one should look at flowers in an imaginative way, to squeeze the fullest enjoyment from them.
The pink Fantasy, with its apple-green feathering, is fairly common; Red Champion is a deeper version of Fantasy, a real cherry-red, opening to an enormous size, and heavily fringed; Orange Favourite, smudged with buttercup yellow and green, not quite so large; the Blue Parrot, which is not blue at all but a deep mauve, really the color of blackberry fool (horticulturalists sometimes have very queer ideas about naming colours); Sunshine, a golden yellow — all these are fun to grow, and no more expensive to buy than the ordinary tulip. But there are far more frenzied variations. Galdelan was the maddest-looking tulip I ever had in my garden. It was smeared with as many colours as a painter’s palette after a good day’s work — dark blue, dark red, purple, green, white — and as to size, it must have measured eight inches across when fully opened. This costs 1s.3d. a bulb, so I got only three as an experiment, and abstained altogether from the Black Parrot at a guinea. Gadelan was enough, for the moment, to keep me satisfied and startled.”
— In Your Garden, Vita Sackville-West, The Tulip Anthology, pp. 197.
Sel.
Salt-stained
above decks
and all the incestuous markers of our
matching pattern youths’ or
the majority of the winded
passage.
Such is the desire
deeper, darker
bled it
seems
beneath the sod and thread through of
the slip
round turn and two a half hitched
cast of a found ore we discovered
somewhere, in an alleyway or ?
In another year
another ‘pursed’ mouth’s reading
sails
woven sheen and satin—
All else enforces the beholders of fictions,
so say I imagine, the ‘sex’ that lengthens with age
just as much as the stride, finally weave
over taking waft
something that exists
something of real
substance.
You once told me in a now distant whisper
the way your hip-bones project cuttingly into Euclidian spaces
like Southern diamonds
cut mine’s
for the die.
Such as I intend to sell my skin, my posessions
soon, last thoughts
as Medusa’s mind was setting on cured parchment reasons.
How I gathered always at you and thought of the mark, rather
of knowledge’s eternal shield
and on various wavelengths as if
radiated atmosphere
the dreams would drive me—
I think of a new born’s eyes
with love and terror
‘forever’, in the end
is a fiction that you
live.
