At first you thought you’d plant it with the rest. But you were defeated by its fragility and the stem’s refusal to grow. The bulb turned out to be insensitive to spring and, though half its name was light, sunshine meant nothing to it. Glass made it glimmer like a living thing, but you soon discovered it was not. Why call the object bulb, then? Why give it that shape? Isn’t this false advertising, the height of corporate deceit, igniting our hopes that it will be a brighter daffodil, a tulip for the dark, a gleaming gladiolus, its tall stalk like a string of old-fashioned Christmas lights turning on its blossoms one by one?