Janet, I love having your response to my comments and everyone else's! And thanks, too, for the openness with which you've revealed the history of this poem. I find it amazing how poems manage to tell more than we thought they would, and sometimes more than we wanted them to. It's as if they had an agenda of their own, inherent in the nature of the writing process, and indifferent to our own conscious wishes. I've had the experience many times of writing what a I intended to be a poem of praise--or forgiveness, or what have you--only to have the reverse of the intended feeling--the thing that needed forgiving in the first place--crash the party and refuse to leave.
The tension in your poem belongs in there, and I wouldn't touch it: it deepens and validates an experience, a relationship being remembered, precisely by not "cleaning it up," but only conveying the wish that it could be remembered as entirely "clean," as maybe nothing human can be.
I think one of the things I love and treasure about poetry is its habit of truth-telling, its stubborn way of dealing, not with the flat places that are easy to walk on, but with the cracked places in memory that are hard to navigate, like this one.
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