Aware of all this mutability, I ask what does not change:
The longing of the heart to know is what I find myself
saying.
One first learned it a long time ago and then it seemed
simple to assuage,
But the world gets more complicated and the answers are
never any easier.
I look at these colors you have set before me—deep
scarlets, water-flecked yellow of tulips:
My eye drinks in the intensity of each but still is unas-
suaged.
If I should live several lifetimes I still shall not have
exhausted the possibilities of even these flowers:
Why should I think of the world that it should be in any
way simpler?
—Peyton Houston, “Looking at Tulips”
Art credit Hollis Brown Thornton
