This poem demonstrates the dangers of "craft" and revision. Note the following problems:

1. "All day" -- a variation on the "for days" meme.

2. The emotionally "fraught" line break. "my hand / stroking the deep / gold of your thighs." The too obviously "crafted" use of line breaks to suggest movement and change.

3. The use of the adjective "tiny" as an emotional intensifier. Another period style cliché.

4. Sentimentality.

5. Sentimentality. No emotional tension.

6. A general dullness of vocabulary. The entire scene is viewed through a gauzy, dull lens. All the life has been revised out of the poem (assuming that there was something fresh in the first version!).

7. Absence of wit. Nothing jars us to see something in a different light.

8. Did I mention sentimentality?

[9. Plus, if you came here via limetree, those Wallace Stevens lumps in the gravy. Kasey, while accepting my arguments, still likes the poem, and, indeed, it is a pleasant, likeable poem in many respects.]

Because, or despite, of all this, it is a "good poem." That is, it would pass muster in the writing workshop. All the features I list belong to the conventional practice of writing that Hall and others of his ilk have codified. It is the McPoem that Hall himself denounces.