Kevin Young

I see also how the tone changes.

There's this kind of, as you put it, kind of fondness at the beginning, and it quickly evaporates.

Both the stanzas get much shorter.

That last stanza is just sort of these four or five blunt statements, these full lines, as opposed to the kind of

Getting on our coats, the tetherball, its towering height, the swings, this kind of romance almost.

I remember those tetherballs, you know.

But the sort of danger is complicated, really, in the end.

I mean, she makes it simple, and I love how simple the language is.

But there's this kind of other danger that's lurking besides just a physical one, say.

That's right.

That's right.

Yes, exactly.

After those cattle and the carving.

Yeah.

Well, I think there's a level of defeatedness in that gesture.

Her arms hang down like sausages.

At the same time, after we've read it and we go back and see, make me miss her.

Does she really miss her, you think?

I think that opening, while most of us copied letters out of books, you think she's going to say, Mrs. Lawrence taught us, you know, to think.

As I said, she's, you know, carving her nails or sort of paring back and, you know, she's kind of in judgment, you know, this kind of nail pairing God notion of this person doing a thing that perhaps you shouldn't be doing in public, much less in a classroom.