Philip Wexler's poem begins by admitting defeat in advance. "It was no secret / that she was a flight risk": the men gathered under the balcony already know she will "be true / to none of us." They come anyway, "thirsting for a token." The poem is about wanting something you have been warned you won't get, and about how readily hope forgets a warning. Its central idea is that a gift offered to everyone belongs to no one, however much each person in the crowd feels singled out.
The phrase "flight risk" sets up the whole poem. It sounds like legal jargon, someone likely to skip town, but the poem takes it literally. Her kiss is "sent flying," the men swing their arms "back like wings," and the kiss reaches its "apex" before it bursts. Even the smallest unit of affection, "a peck," belongs to the vocabulary of birds. She is the flight risk, and the whole scene is built from flight imagery.
The title explains what happens at that apex. A chrysanthemum is a flower, but it is also a kind of firework whose burst opens into radiating streaks. The poem never mentions fireworks directly, so this is an inference from the title and the action, but it fits closely: something launched into the night sky, "invisible" until it explodes, then dividing into "kisses / by the thousands" that vanish "in seconds." The kiss becomes a public spectacle. Each man hoped for a private message, and what he gets is a display for the whole crowd.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It is built from short two-line stanzas, and the lines are broken to control suspense. When the men "swung / our arms back like wings," the line ends mid-motion, and the reader's eye drops down to catch up. "At its apex, / invisible, her kiss burst" works the same way, with the single word "invisible" delaying the explosion we can't see. The brief couplets suit a scene that happens in seconds, and they leave the reader, like the crowd, craning upward.
The poem also turns on a pair of reversals. The burst is "shattering our expectations / but in the next moment / renewing our hopes." The balance of those two clauses mimics the emotional swing: crushed, then instantly revived. The second reversal is the poem's cruelest. The thousands of kisses seem to answer every man's wish, yet "not a peck" is left. Abundance and emptiness arrive almost together.
The men's language gives them away. Each expects to be "the lucky target," a phrase that makes the kiss a projectile and the lover a marksman, which is an odd way to talk about tenderness. They are quick to see themselves as winners and slow to notice that she hasn't aimed at anyone. The pronoun "we" matters here. The speaker never separates himself from the crowd, so the poem becomes a shared, slightly comic humiliation instead of a private heartbreak. A reader can smile at the men's eagerness and still recognize it.
The woman is never given a voice. We see only her gestures: leaning back, pressing fingers to lips, letting go. At the end she is "seeking amusement / elsewhere," and the verb "disappeared" lets her slip away as easily as the kiss did. The speaker's tone is wry rather than bitter, but the last image is physical and a little pitiful. The men are left "gaping / and parched," mouths open and dry. That closes the thirst imagery from the second stanza, where they "thirsted for a token." They wanted a drink and were given a firework. The closing phrase, "in her wake," suggests a boat's trail of disturbed water, so even the aftermath is described in terms of motion she has already left behind.
The poem is worth reading because it takes an old situation, the unattainable beloved and her hopeful admirers, and makes it fresh through one well-sustained image. In about twenty short lines it is funny, vivid, and quietly sad, and the humor and the ache come from the same small event. It also shows how a poem can say a great deal by following a single image, here a kiss in flight, all the way to its end.