JAKE ARTHUR

 

Changed Opinion As To Flowers

 

Here, reader, an oddity: 
a daisy-chain left on the squat rack, 
a fragile thing with stitched limbs, 
on the safety hook –– and the weights 
a solid 150 –– he who left it here lifts. 

What do daisies say? Given like 
a child’s necklace between careful thumbs, 
imagine he carried it, put it down, replaced it, 
and now it hangs, fluorescent day extinguished, 
in the moonlight gleaming and slowly dying. 

A chain is connection, a daisy speaks play, 
but this gift is a message he could not read. 
So he placed it here, hooped it over the peg 
as though decorating a neck –– and he left –– 
with a changed opinion as to flowers. 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jake Arthur is writing a Master’s thesis about gardens and poetry. He has poems published in Sweet Mammalian and an essay on poetics in Poetry NZ. The title “Changed Opinion as to Flowers” is taken from Juliet Fleming’s essay of the same name, which is part of a book called Renaissance Paratexts.