» Poetry

Two Poems

Jane Zwart

Plots

I know: people want roads. They want room
for paths to fork and converge. A story is better
if its hero might be lost, if no one has taken
reversal off the table. But a great plot is too much
for me. I max out at raised and sunken beds.

A repurposed sandbox, fine: beans’ greedy ringlets,
an argyle trellis; tomatoes drooping outside
steel gyres; a frame of marigolds to put off deer.
Blind alleys under lawns, yes, and fraud roses
and knee prints, balloons in every stage of dilation.

The woman thinning the zucchini; the child
plowing a stripped crayon, lengthwise, over a page
his father holds square across a gently canted
stone: I cannot tell you their befores or their afters.
Those plots are beyond me. I can only write Look.

Used Benison

Tonight I am borrowing a septuagenarian’s life,
his lap full of husks and silk, his friend running
streetlights; they are rushing ears of sweetcorn

to boiling water, they are racing sugar’s corrosion
into starch. I am borrowing everything. The chrysalis
a boy set on his dresser for its shape alone. The brief

pet it bred. I am trying on a whole record of wonder:
the child’s, an inning into summer; the groom’s,
his paisley a distraction to the Baptists; the old

     fellow’s—

if this is life who could earn their keep—when he

     throws
up his hands. There is a joy that helpless. I borrow it.
I too have been loved more than makes sense.