Alison Jarvis

February Elegy with Tulips on a Glass Table
June 22, 2021 Jarvis Alison

February Elegy with Tulips on a Glass Table

 

It’s the yellow dust inside the tulips.
It’s the shape of a tulip.

James Schuyler

 

 

There’s no controlling them — even cut, they grow,
even cut, they keep turning, they swoon

 

over the lip of the vase —  petals closed, petals
splayed, or falling, edges sunset

 

insides still on fire.
Three are hands and I name them:

 

Beseecher, Beggar, Supplicant,
over there is a mouth, a little open,

 

the long vowel in only. Only one
is standing straight, the last sentence

 

in a book you can’t bear to finish.
He is the yellow dust

 

blanketing a glass table whereon
stands a row of his cello bridges —

 

cowboys with bowed legs
and carved-out hearts fixed

 

to a drift of wood. And next to it
a black stone, ovoid, worked flat

 

by water, oiled by our fingers,
a perfect fit

 

for the palm. A hummingbird
still lives in his binoculars.

 

This is a made place —
but isn’t the mind an archive?

 

Isn’t the body? Think of the hummingbird —
think of my heart — how it beats

 

1200 times a minute.

Alison Jarvis received the Gerald Cable Award for her book Where is North, the Lyric Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Guy Owen Award from Southern Poetry Review. She is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City.