Tulip Bulb (Semper Augustus)

Lyrics

January.
Sixteen thirty-seven.
You, a brown fist of promise in a wooden crate.
Semper Augustus.

Just a bulb.
An onion in the cellar's cold.
Smell of damp earth and sleeping roots.
Not a glint of gold, not a shimmer of silver.
Just a tight-wrapped paper skin.
Holding your breath until spring.
While outside, in the Wapen van Amsterdam tavern,
A fever is trading your name.

Ten thousand guilders for a flower they've never seen.
Ten thousand guilders for a pattern in a dream.
Enough for the grandest house on the canal.
Brick and gables, a coach house for the horses,
An eighty-foot garden, all your own.
For you.
Sleeping in the dark.

The contract is paper. A promissory note.
They call it windhandel... a trade on the wind.
I see Adrian Pauw lean in, his whisper a cloud of tobacco smoke.
The scratch of a quill seals the deal.
They aren't buying you.
They're buying the story of you.
The idea of you.
That perfect, impossible bloom.

Ten thousand guilders for a flower they've never seen.
Ten thousand guilders for a pattern in a dream.
Enough for the grandest house on the canal.
Brick and gables, a coach house for the horses,
An eighty-foot garden, all your own.
For you.
A promise in the dark.

And the secret they didn't know...
The secret you held so tight.
The fiery red streaks on the purest white...
The beauty they paid a fortune for...
Was a sickness.
A fever in your veins.
The tulip breaking virus.
The flaw was the art. The disease was the price.
The most beautiful thing was the broken thing.

Semper Augustus.
Always August.
A whole brick house for a beautiful fever.
What a strange faith.