Three Poems

By Daniel Brown

On a Satiric Song

          I don't care if it rains or freezes
          Long as I got my plastic Jesus
          Sittin' on the dashboard of my car.

As though the plasticness
Of plastic Jesuses
Is what the problem is.

As though a talisman
Done in porcelain
Is something else again.



On a Peace that Passes Understanding

He’s how surprised to hear it?
No more surprised than I
To hear myself respond to his
Inquiring as to my

Favorite season by saying
“One’s as good as another to me.”
You’ll pardon us both for wondering
If that can really be.

Not have a favorite season?
A special feeling, say,
For sailing leaves in preference 
To the massing ones of May? 

Perhaps I’ve reached a Zen-ness
No preference can survive.
(Or an age when any season serves
That finds me still alive.)



April

Though maybe not the cruelest,
It’s still a month whose promises
Are more than happy to suggest
How iffy their fulfillment is.

Yet here we have an April day
That doesn’t wear the slightest shroud;
Whose sun’s a sun, that is to say,
That doesn’t double as a cloud.

A child, this day could be construed,
Of this past winter’s many snows
And marked reluctance to conclude:
“Spring! Spring at last!” the spirit goes.

Could be construed? Let’s call it done,
I would have said, but there’s a view
I hold as well, my being one
Whose mind is prone to being two:

That any April-imaged bliss
No longer means enough to me
To pierce with its unlikeliness
(If not impossibility).

DANIEL BROWN's latest book is What More? (2015). His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, and Parnassus.