Accordingly, love predates. It is the first of twelve
unique glimpses of the open petal. The others, in no
particular order: harmony, value, shine, scale, color,
scope, distance, explanation, viability, blush and resin.
-The History of Tulips
In The History of Tulips, a butterfly is a type of shadow
that has seen all twelve glimpses of the open petal.
They are common to the Third Hemisphere,
found sometimes wandering the forest hallways
of the Fourth. Their scholars have anxious jaws,
bitter, unclean fingernails and an obsession
with the bright light of television reruns,
particularly when it reflects off the skin.
Let me restate:
the skin has been flooding with blood for eons.
It is said that the first blush was probably an accident
and we are correct to disregard it.
All attention should fall on its cousin, the second blush,
which swept outward from a cheek
and turned the colors of an entire desert.
Let me restate again:
The skin is an aura. A taffy-pulled
particle of light. There are no singing bowls
that do not sing to it, no postman
delivering sentimental letters that do not
have its scent burrowed deep into their fibers.
Without it, we are bones and organs
related loosely through lazy innuendo.
Surely in the upper spheres
there’s a kaleidoscope that the luminous tailors use
to cover our soft humanity
And yet, the butterflies, in their scholarly writings,
make no mention of such a device.
Instead, they speak of the world as a single moment
in which a holy voice whispers them into being.
Their entire language is based
on these whispers. In it, they have over two thousand
sounds for colors, each of which comes in three
tenses. By comparison there is only one sound
for us: tchtckscht, which translates to
the pause between words that holds the color red.
Philip Jason was born and raised in NY. He graduated from The University of Pennsylvania with a degree in business. He has published in a variety of literary magazines including Prairie Schooner, The Pinch, Ninth Letter, Mid American Review, Canary and Summerset Review, and has received the Henfield Prize in Fiction. His first novel, Window Eyes, is available from Unsolicited Press.