Tulip Fever
Underhill, Vermont
I wander, light starved into the 1,000 tulips my husband planted, just as they open their gaping red and purple jaws, just as the sun finally drags its paw across the mangy battered meadows. What an indulgence, the farmers must say, as they bitterly whack the caked manure off their black rubber boots.
Still, how I love them with such desperate hunger. In their presence, my brain begins its frantic hunt, ravenous pounce, an almost violent pecking of metaphors, similes flocking in like a murder of crows. I used to think it was in the ritual of perfect description I could be closest to them:
May 15: Burning Hearts, Queens of the Night, lipstick streaked, thighs splayed open
May 16: Orange flames of the Fire Parrot black-beaked and wild, guzzling wells of ink down their necks.
May 17: Double fringed white Angeliques, a whole squawk of geese flapping and nipping toward sky.
May 18: Giant red Darwins, shiny clawed lobsters, underbellies bulging and blue veined.
And yet it was still a kind of torture to be separate from the tulips.
As a child, hoping to swallow their beauty whole, I sucked on a petal, a mammoth white lobe bringing nothing but a gagging fake communion.
I didn’t know that something mute and elemental would open, as I sat throat deep in that field, and let the tulips be, a kind of quiet softening in the bed of my mind, that I would come to cherish for even five or six seconds, when all the crows stopped pecking and all the tender beauty of my husband’s crop, by now pockmarked with such desperate description, finally stopped bleeding.
ADRIE KUSSEROW is the author of three books of poetry – Refuge and Hunting Down the Monk (BOA Editions) and THE TRAUMA MANTRAS: A Memoir in Prose Poems (Duke University Press, 2024) – as well as an ethnography American Individualisms (Palgrave MacMillan). Read more.
Originally published in The Trauma Mantras (Duke UP, 2024).