This is one of those poems written very rapidly that draws very directly on the unconscious, or perhaps on the automatic, shifting from association to association. I do not remember if I wrote it when it really was two in the morning but I might have, and I think I probably had been drinking too much, though the repetition of ‘poured and poured and poured and poured’ still sounds to me almost as full of relish as regret. No, it probably was with pure regret I wrote down poured over and over again, like a door slamming, which I probably felt like in my head, and which would have given rise to the door in the next line. 

It is a poem that can’t be read literally, obviously, because how can a cliff stitch a voice to the ground, but it doesn’t come together as any kind of extended metaphor either. It is probably the kind of poem that turns a lot of readers off poetry. When I first wrote it I wasn’t sure it was a poem but liked it, then I came back to it as a draft, or as poetry material, and tried to revise it, taking out the blackberries and the cliff, trying to make it work more coherently, but of course that didn’t work. The way doors lead to a cliff, the mother is associated with blackberries, the taste on a tongue is a silver lining stitched to a cloud, works with the pacing and associative logic of a dream and has – at least to me – that resonance dreams have, which is also what I look to poetry for.  I think the voice of the mother is more silver lining than cloud, is more sweetness than threat, but I like it that there is a little ambiguity, while the daughter is all silver lining. I am not sure about the last line. 

I think it is there maybe mostly for the rhythm. I read this poem once at a reading and the last line did read well, it even had quite a strange emotional charge. But it would probably also be possible to read ‘all around / her shining face’ with more charge and a different emphasis (maybe the line break placed differently?) if the poem were to end there.