comments on two poems combined, version 2

I rearranged the lines. It struck me that most of the poem breaks into couplets – “I dry my hand again. Look, pie! / The crust will hold guests,” for example. I tried couplets as stanzas but after a couple readings decided the space was asking each couplet to stand on its own in a way they just wouldn’t do.

That coupleting is a sort of halfway place between the single-line statements of the first of the two source poems and the sentences that wind down through multiple lines in the second source poem. I prefer sinuousness in sentences; yet the stiffness of version 2 here appeals to me for its insistent strangeness. That line – “Ugh, that uncut handkerchief – yuck!” – has a particularly unnatural quality.