This Is Just to Say

The form is so accessible, so casual, so unintimidating, so inviting that it hardly seems poem-like. The poem, as a formal thing, takes up so little space on the page, the lines brief and chiseled, and the alternating lengths of each line creating a feeling of formal carelessness and spontaneity, appropriate for a poem about the speaker happening upon the fruit in the icebox.

Formally, the poem is 28 words set in three quatrains, or clusters of four lines, which alternate between two and three words. Read aloud, the poem reveals itself less like a poem and more like a hastily dashed note left in the kitchen. The poem offers no end-line punctuation. Once the poem is started (and the title can be read as a kind of pre-first line as it goes easily and cleanly into the opening line confession), it moves easily. The poem resists closure even in the last line—no period to close out the sentence. It might be argued that the lack of any end-line punctuation can encourage the careless recitation, the reader moving breathlessly and too eagerly through the clipped lines. The poem hangs luscious long vowels and succulent consonants at the end of lines to encourage the recitation to linger over those words.