[Carl Copeland]

Your poems always sing, Cally, and this one is no exception. The music and the beauty of the words keep me happy even where the meaning escapes me, as in “bolts the clown.” It’s a Dylan high (Thomas and Bob both): I often understand them less than I do you, but I get high on them anyway.

You really had me grooving to the trimeter of the first three lines, so I stumbled through the apparent tetrameter of S1L4 and dimeter of S1L6. (The latter reads most naturally as “when ETna blows SMOKE rings.”) Both, in themselves, are great lines, as others have said, but I regretted losing the beat.

One thing I didn’t get is how “don’t” turns to “do” in the poem. The first two stanzas paint a dark picture, which might provoke us to “do” something about it, but the third stanza seems to find a bleak, but beautiful refuge in the natural world. That was Paula’s point, though she was talking about the original stanza, and the revision makes it even stronger. The poem really does turn “don’t” into “dew,” rather than “do,” as Nemo put it.

That said, the new third stanza is my favorite, and my favorite lines are the same as Mary’s. “The hunch of the half-starved possum gnawing the blackberry canes” is so vivid that I know you were there.

Just when I was getting used to all the whens without follow-through, “but the fool who …” raised another false hope of a complete sentence. The idea, I guess, is to keep us in suspension to the end.

In “humming about nothing new,” you’ve pulled off the supposedly impossible three consecutive unstressed syllables. That’s the way I naturally read it, and it worked for me.

Cally, I apologize for neglecting to mention you in a neighboring thread among recent Deep End divers. Great to see you, Rick, Siham and Mary making such flawless entries!