April 1: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Daffodil

It’s April Fools Day (so beware) and it’s the first day of Poetry Month. To commemorate the two, I have mashed up two well-known poems (William Wordworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” and Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird) with some of my own words to create a daffy poem.

Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Daffodil

I

After the gray snow melts,

The only moving thing:

A host of daffodils.

 

II

I was of two minds,

Wandering lonely as a cloud.

In vacant and pensive mood.

 

III

The daffodil whirled in the spring winds.

It was a pinwheel.

 

IV

A woman and a man

Are one.

A woman and a man and a daffodil

Are one too.

 

V

I do not know which to prefer

The bliss or solitude

Or jocund company.

The daffodil blooming

Or the memory of its yellow.

 

VI

Grime shades the window

With elemental dirt

The yellow of the daffodil

Flutters in the breeze

The mood

Traced in yellow

An indecipherable bloom.

 

VII

O fat friends from Chicago

Why do you imagine the spring buds?

Do you not see how the daffodil

Rises from the dirt

Around your feet?

 

VII

I know terrible secrets

And half-hearted poems, inescapable stories

But I know too

The daffodil is as yellow

As Muriel’s dress.

 

IX

When the daffodil died

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

 

X

At the sight of daffodils

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Even the bards of history

Would cry out sharply.

 

XI

He drove the students

In a special bus.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The yellow in the rearview

For daffodils.

 

XII

The river is moving.

The daffodil must be blooming.

 

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It wasn’t snowing

And it wasn’t going to snow.

The daffodil preens

In the leaf mold.

 

XIV

My heart with pleasure fills

And dances with the daffodils.