Swell

Mid-March, on the daily a.m. drop-off 
through a bunch of affluent side streets 
between school and here

a refrigerated dairy produce truck 
keeps catching almond and dogwood branches, 
so much that blossoms blizzard

the windscreen and moonroof 
and I have to switch the wipers 
to intermittent in its slipstream.

All I mean to say is that it was lovely, 
that not every given is bleak or wrong 
and some even are as gorgeous as they are elementary.

The kids come home on different buses 
the same shade of egg yolk. 
We call my mother from the shore for Easter.

That truck and blossoms story gets longer, 
hokier, with each retelling. I'm not bothered. 
April's bright stretches, the mailman says, are swell.

Our local 'Y' widens its opening hours a smidgen. 
The clay courts opposite pock and shuffle. 
I learn to swim. 

- Connor O’Callaghan

To the Moon

After I thumbed a ride I saw you
in the passenger window, more
than a crescent, almost half.
It was getting dark, and a voice
on the car radio was reporting
that Neil Armstrong had stepped
onto the Sea of Tranquility.
He was walking there in the dust.

Five times more, men visited,
two at a time. Some of them
lowered moon buggies out of a bay
in the side of the lander. These
they unfolded and took for a spin. 

Flower children of my generation
thought that the men were middle-aged,
and they were, but they were children too.
They left moon buggies in your lap.

I wanted to tell you last year,
when I saw you in the bare limbs
at your narrowest crescent
next to the morning star,
and just this fall when you were large
and bright as I had ever seen:

to consider you in the night sky is
to release the mind more deeply into itself.
If Earth is alive, you were alive
when these men lived on you.
When they left you died,
and they plunged living into the sea.

- Brooks Haxton

Vows

You said I want to be married.
You said I want to be married

to you. You said We were children
together. Who better?

You said I moved for you once
already. You said I need this.

You said It will be quick.
Backyard. July. My mother

will cook, my brother will DJ.
Here’s the date. Here’s the phone.

You said There is so much
to do: spray the bushes

with repellent, bind
these sunflowers with twine.

Hack this stump down
to a hollow, fill it with stone.

Here. Standing in July,
in the backyard, reciting the words

you wrote in ballpoint
on a scrap of ruled paper. Here

I am. And slowly, as if
emerging from a long sleep,

and looking around,
and confusing myself

for the cufflinks, the hushed
crowd, the white tent

billowing like a sail – I take
your hand. I start to speak.

- Edgar Kunz, from “Tap Out”