Two people spend an afternoon pressing flowers inside books they have stolen, and by the end one of them is asking for a promise. That journey, from a lazy, mildly criminal pastime to a plea for companionship, is the whole arc of "Broken corollas." The poem is interesting for how much it fits into so small a gesture.
The opening is deliberately unhurried. The speakers press flowers "not knowing / or caring / how long the process took," and the broken lines copy that shrug. Yet there is a flicker of doubt about whether the experiment will "work or just cover us / in the evanescing colours / of broken corollas." "Evanescing" is the poem's most unusual word. It means fading gradually, and it names a process rather than a state, so the colours are already vanishing as we read. The fear that the colour might stain the people instead of the pages suggests that the speakers, as much as the petals, are being marked by time.
The poem then turns the flowers into an idea. Pairing "stolen poetry books" with "plucked flowers" is the key move, because both are things taken without really belonging to anyone. The speakers spend their day on "distinctions & equivalence; / the thrill of transgression, / the ambiguity of possession." This is a charming subject for a lazy afternoon, but it also asks who owns a poem, a flower, or a person. It also hints at a cost, since pressing a flower means first picking it. Preservation begins with a small act of taking.
The middle stanza is the densest. "Currents of nuance ran through us / as consequence of curvatures / in time; / of our spines & / invisible lines / where the light bends, blends & divides." Sound carries much of the meaning. The hard c's of "currents," "consequence" and "curvatures" roll forward like the currents they describe. "Spines" and "lines" make the one clear rhyme in a poem that otherwise has none, so it stands out. "Spines" also works twice, for the spines of books and for the spines of bodies, which quietly merges the readers and the thing read. "Bends, blends & divides" puts joining and separating in a single breath, just as "distinctions & equivalence" did a few lines earlier. The light could be refracting through a prism or a petal, and the poem seems to like things that can be two things at once.
The form is free verse with no regular meter. The ampersands make the voice sound casual, like talk, and they link ideas without the formality of "and." The white space does real work. Indented phrases like "not knowing" and "plucked flowers" leave pauses, and the isolated "dried," on its own short line looks as brittle as its meaning. The two ellipses, after "corollas" and after "live," let the poem trail off at its most fragile moments.
The turning point is "we knew wasted time is not a wasted life, / only / that our ideas about true beauty / make it hard to live…" The lone "only" is a hinge. The consolation arrives and is qualified in the same breath, so the lesson comes with a price. Devotion to beauty, the poem admits, can make ordinary living harder.
The ending answers that difficulty with something simple. "But if you promise to stay / I'll promise not to leave" is the first time the poem speaks directly to "you," and it shifts from past-tense memory to a present-tense appeal. "Stay" and "leave" are mirror images, and each promise depends on the other, so neither person is offered security alone. The vow is also modest: it is a conditional, not a grand declaration. A reader might even hear a faint echo of the "leaves" of books and plants in that last word, though that is an inference.
What makes the poem worth reading is its quiet argument. Flowers pressed flat in stolen pages can keep their shape but not their life. The poem suggests that beauty cannot be held in place, only accompanied through its fading, and the promise to stay is its version of that.