~ Reprise of an Old Apology ~ a poem...?

Question

Not the most original thing in the world...and I realize that meter and rhyme are not in a perfect pattern, so I will label this free verse, I suppose. :-)

Reprise of and Old Apology

This evening I hope you are okay...

This evening was lovely...

Since it's been a long while,

I was thinking about a similar day.

We used to be good friends--

That was last summer...

I hope everything came through

And that you understand...everything.

This probably won't be

One of my better works.

If evening lasted hours more

Maybe I would chose better words.

This didn't happen like I thought it might:

I guess we chose different lives.

I remember what I forgot:

When I kept saying "Sorry," maybe I should have stopped.

Answer 1

I have enjoyed your work.  What this poem has in common with your `Poem of Summer' is a sense of impenetrable closeness and an air of elegy; but `Reprise' cultivates an intimacy with its reader that speaks to the moment, similar in tone to the Sonnets from the Portuguese.  `Summer' distanced itself in time, and through channelling a social class which exists only in poetry.  This poem hints at the mediaeval only because that era alone resonates with doomed love; the lack of motion this implies is the obvious difference from the Portuguese's sonnets.

Did you notice that the first ten syllables of your last line, an apology for garrulousness, apparently, is the only complete string of iambic pentameter in this poem?  Your free verse is splendid -- but I say this being utterly incapable myself of harmonious free verse, and so always over-analyse it.  The repetition of `evening' is lovely, and you maintain a surprisingly high tone, despite using the word `okay.'  Other than okay/day, the slant-rhymes are wonderful and barely there.  (How many slant-rhymes are in works/more/words?  Zero, one, two?)

I know your poem itself says this, but let me in my unwisdom elaborate, that perhaps this poem does read as a little fragment.  It thrives, perhaps, on mysteries and may not bear the company of other verses well, or memorisation.  Yet, I thank you for the pleasure I took reading it and commenting upon it.