notes.

1. the last line of each stanza is often a mid-sentence break, which continues in the stanza below. insert mental punctuation where it gets confusing. for example, the first stanzas: I’ve got to tell you how I love you always. I think of it on grey mornings, with death in my mouth. The tea is never hot enough then, and the cigarette dry. The maroon robe chills me.

2. the feeling, often expressed in cliched phrases – I love you always, I need you, I miss you always – is balanced by the little details, the particulars, the things that don’t seem to fit a love poem, exactly, but they end up making it more real: the buses glow, I stand rattling my keys, were there lots of anchovies.

3. the words in this poem are simple; the verbs are “to be” verbs or very low-key action verbs, such as “look,” “hold,” “stand.” Even though we end up with several different place images (the speaker’s home, the dock, the city streets, the parking lot, the beach, the night sky), we don’t notice the movement as much as the the same feeling of loneliness and longing that stays present in the whole poem.

4. the last stanza – the culmination of these feelings – feels right because the earlier poem gives us “passenger” images: buses, car, bicycle. So when we get to that metaphor, it clicks into place and reiterates (without repeating) both the feelings and the images of the poem.