Bloom (II)
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.
“This is a description of ‘Bloom,’ an Ovidian mural painted on the stairway wall of our house by the artist David Teng Olsen—roughly the frontal lobe of our house. I think of it as a depiction of our house's thoughts about us. The human figures in it, including depictions of our children, are strangely creatural.”
—Dan Chiasson
Dan Chiasson
Dan Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont, on May 9, 1971. He received his BA at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, where he double majored in English and classics. He received his PhD in postwar American poetry at Harvard University.
Chiasson has authored five books of poetry: The Math Campers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020); Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007); and The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002).