I’ve Actually Got a Whole Backstory Related to This One

Photograph and Yellow Tulips:

A little nearer please. And a little nearer
we move to the window, to the polished table.
Objects become professional: mannequins preening
themselves before an audience. Only the tulips
interrogate the camera with yellow oaths.

Smile please. And so we smile. Pose that
never was, time that could never be! And
the long-necked tulips sinuous out of the vase
bend over the polished table entranced
by their own puffed and smudgy reflections.

Hold it. Our two smiling faces caught
on a branch of silence consider shy vacancy.
Soon the tulips, like yellow swans, will
dip their heads into the polished table
frightening us, and so we turn truly smiling.

Thank you. And later, next year or after,
we shall hold it, this most sad witness,
and smile please and come a little nearer
to a time that was never twice, to a place
that could never be thanked enough, so that

now never again may we see such tulips
as tulips, but rather as effulgent swans
sailing through a yellow interior of air
where faces and fantasies will be caught forever
in that black coffin dearly carrying us.

Dannie Abse.