David Teng Olsen, Mural, 2017
At sunset, this October,
I picked some Nippon daisies,
the last flower to flower,
a verb named for its noun.
The weather was all indoors.
A Page solo plus Michelangelo
enameled in cerulean, tangles
of what looked like instant ramen,
a heavy barge in the surf offshore,
a spindly zeppelin down, the scene
split by an architectural birch
crisscrossed by laser blasts.
Dave added the sky one day,
then blew our heads apart
by denying it had ever been a sky.
A spider creature was our sons.
Their hair entangled meant
they would now never be apart,
not their whole lives wandering
in a world itself worryingly
wandering who knows where.
Look, there’s a friendly bloom;
Look, a vivisectionist, a severed wrist.
These thoughts our house had had about us.
Copyright © 2020 by Dan Chiasson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 20, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.