[Carl Copeland]

Lovely, Alexandra. A few thoughts:

Did you intentionally choose the exclamation “Oh” over vocative “O”? I’d have expected the latter, but you may be playing with my expectations as you clearly are with “weeping window.” Every other time I read it, I get “willow” and have to start over!

I’d drop the comma after “now,” but only because I hear no pause there.

To clasp with a grip is borderline redundant, but it’s really “cocksure” that startled me in that line. I suppose you do want the sexual innuendo—especially in close proximity to “bosomed.”

I didn’t experience the left brain–right brain dissonance that Julie did, but it occurred to me that you could address all of her concerns by cutting S2L3 and giving each tercet a triple rhyme. Something like this (though I couldn’t find a rhyme for S2L1):

These mornings,
          shrouded depths, or scenes so clear
it seems the whole of life is bosomed there.

Each picture clasps me with a cocksure grip,
with lilts of sun, but also subtle lisps
of coldness hesitating on the cusp

That would also help foreground the internal rhyme of “clasps” (like “mist” in S1). I suspect, though, as Julie did, that the “technical unpredictability” is more play with expectations.

If you did have an alternative ending, as Jim suggests, you chose the right one for me.