Three Poems By Dan Campion

               Dream and Daydream

Our parents. How they come to us in dreams,
we only children. In our old age they
become our friends and siblings, an array
of stars and planets’ bright but distant gleams,
vague children we don’t have. One will play
the mirror of the other. Look away,
the mirror is reversed. The dawning day
rubs both reflections out with dusty beams.
The day’s reflections take a different hue.
Our mother and our father, more distinct,
remind us who they were and who we are.
The more we three daydream, the more we’re linked,
the more we are encompassed in one view,
the more worlds are devoured by our star.

               Well and Good

Let’s note, like “oil and water,” “thoughts and prayers”
implies the two things mentioned do not mix.
I’m willing to believe thought never cares
for praying, prayers are dense as paving bricks.
But those who use the formula don’t seem
to hear the implication. Just as well,
I guess. For sympathy and comfort deem
one phrase as good as others, truth to tell.
Which brings up “well and good,” which people say
ironically, if they employ at all:
“That’s well and good for March, but what of May?”
and you can taste in it the hint of gall.
I think that this and thats add up to much
about our wants and needs, our such and such.

               Give and Take

The medium of commerce is exchange
itself, itself a metamorphosis
of former metamorphoses. The range
of transformations runs from that to this,
for which placeholders you may substitute
whatever objects or abstractions come
to mind. They give, you take: a blue serge suit,
a clinching proof. The game is zero-sum.
Except it’s infinite, or very large,
so large we cannot comprehend its scale.
And every particle entails a charge
the others must surrender, without fail.
The system takes a toll. But gives it back.
And leaves, to all, the ghosts of what they lack.

Dan Campion is the author of the poetry books A Playbill for Sunset (2022) and The Mirror Test (2024) and the monograph Peter De Vries and Surrealism (1995) and is a co-editor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (1981; 2nd ed. 1998, 3rd ed. 2019). Dan’s poetry has appeared previously in Grand Little Things and in many other magazines. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.