A Yellow Tulip

With weary grace
you lean,
green, like
the dying sigh of spring,
over the bottle's glass lip.
Three long leaves enfold your slender stem:
two, the dainty swell of rabbit's ears,
lightly creased from root to tip,
one, a flat, exhausted tongue of
rubber husk,
tasting the tabletop.
Your hollow yellow blossom
thin, like finespun silk, but
crisp as dewy cabbage
tilts its wide mouth earthward as though
huffing out its candle.