Wild Daisies by Bub Bridger

If you love me

Bring me flowers 

Wild daisies 

Clutched in your fist 

Like a torch 

No orchids or roses 

Or carnations 

No florist's bow 

Just daisies 

Steal them 

Risk your life for them 

Up the sharp hills 

In the teeth of the wind 

If you love me 

Bring me daisies 

That I will cram 

In a bright vase 

And marvel at

The Visit by Jenny Bornholdt

Megan

Mary

You approach the world

with open arms and hope

it wants you. Hope to be

asked in to sit amongst the

fine furniture. The world is

busy and polite and believes

in independence. You want

to make friends, be

boisterous. You'd expected

something a little more

gregarious but you'll

take a photo anyway to show

your friends. Here it is.

Here's the world on a good

day, turned slightly

away, but this is no

offence, merely the sun was

in its eyes and it turned

briefly to avoid being

blinded by it.

Sprezzatura by James Arthur

Mary

Megan

        Effortlessness, I learn again,

        means putting all opinion & mulishness aside,

    

        so when this almost-nothingness

        alights, as occasionally it must

        it lands with the padding footfall of a child ballerina

        who's terrified to be there, & hopeful,

        so that when it turns,

        fast, spinning

        as a dreidel spins, it seems to have no contours

        or definite sides,

        so that it's compact

        & can deflect any point

        & springs like laughter, for it's of the world

        & there is such a thing

Honda Pavarotti by Tony Hoagland

Megan

Will

I'm driving on the dark highway

when the opera singer on the radio

opens his great mouth

and the whole car plunges down the canyon of his throat.

So the night becomes an aria of stars and exit signs

as I steer through the galleries

of one dilated Italian syllable

after another. I love the passages in which

the rich flood of the baritone

strains out against the walls of the esophagus,

and I love the pauses

in which I hear the tenor's flesh labor to inhale

enough oxygen to take the next plummet

up into the chasm of the violins.

In part of the song, it sounds as if the singer

is being squeezed by an enormous pair of tongs

while his head and legs keep kicking.

In part of the song, it sounds as if he is

standing in the middle of a coliseum,

swinging a 300-pound lion by the tail,

the empire of gravity

conquered by the empire of aerodynamics,

the citadel of pride in flames

and the citizens of weakness

celebrating their defeat in chorus,

joy and suffering made one at last,

joined in everything a marriage is alleged to be,

though I know the woman he is singing for

is dead in a foreign language on the stage beside him,

though I know his chain mail is made of silver-painted plastic

and his mismanagement of money is legendary,

as I know I have squandered

most of my own life

in a haze of trivial distractions,

and that I will continue to waste it.

But wherever I was going, I don't care anymore,

because no place I could arrive at

is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience

but to which experience will never measure up.

And that dark and soaring fact

is enough to make me renounce the whole world

or fall in love with it forever.

The Yellow Bowl by Rachel Contreni Flynn









Mary

Megan

If light pours like water 

into the kitchen where I sway

with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us

is woven with tough flowers,

and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft

of fruit, the sun - warmed plums,

if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,

then loneliness has lost its shape,

and this quiet is only quiet.











Antilamentation by Dorianne Laux

Mary

Megan

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Darkling Summer, Ominous Dusk, Rumorous Rain by Delmore Schwartz

Megan

Mary

 1

A tattering of rain and then the reign

Of pour and pouring-down and down,

Where in the westward gathered the filming gown

Of grey and clouding weakness, and, in the mane

Of the light’s glory and the day’s splendor, gold and vain,

Vivid, more and more vivid, scarlet, lucid and more luminous,

Then came a splatter, a prattle, a blowing rain!

And soon the hour was musical and rumorous:

A softness of a dripping lipped the isolated houses,

A gaunt grey somber softness licked the glass of hours.

  2

Again, after a catbird squeaked in the special silence,

And clouding vagueness fogged the windowpane

And gathered blackness and overcast, the mane

Of light’s story and light’s glory surrendered and ended

—A pebble—a ring—a ringing on the pane,

A blowing and a blowing in: tides of the blue and cold

Moods of the great blue bay, and slates of grey

Came down upon the land’s great sea, the body of this day

—Hardly an atom of silence amid the roar

Allowed the voice to form appeal—to call:

By kindled light we thought we saw the bronze of fall.