"The Pools"

I put a check plus symbol next to The Pools, too reductive a sign for my admiration.  I'm going to try to explain, using the designated terms I learned to assess things,  just why I like the poem so much.  This is a concentrated exercise in using my training to filter and communicate a raw emotional response, so, an analysis:

The reader first hears the speaker tell a memory and, at once, we know that the poem is shrouded by it.  She explains that she "used to look into the green-brown/pools...and see a mystery" (Twitchell l.1-4).  We take on her gaze and therefor her understanding of the past.  This sight becomes "magnified" when the speaker looks closely at a stone in the Ausable River (l.8).  This lens of magnification and imagination looks to all of the elements of the memory and how they weave together.  We enter the woven fibers of nature (smoke, water, air, sun, light) that comprise the moments of the poem.  This shroud of memory obscures our sense of reality, making it more beautiful.  Poetry can do this, can construct language to exact the beauty of a memory.

The speaker returns to the present moment from her memory, using the word "Now" to mark time (l. 10).  Next, she continues to reference the past through the lens of her memory and captures in one image the convergence of many images.  For example, in her memory, she says, "The flume was always full of bark-colored shadows,/ shafts of green light fallen/ from the pines, and the silver swirls/of rising trout where now/ the gray-fleshed hatchery fish/ feed on the damaged magic"(l.25-31).  Shadows and light converge with water in precise detail as she moves farther away from the concrete and closer to her dream-like feeding fish.  This transition again uses her memory to create a concrete moment out of emotion, feeling.  I believe that Twitchell gives primacy to memory instead of the present, and in preserving the memory inside poem, writes a poem that is self-aware of its power to evoke emotion.

"Scraps of that beauty survive in the world here and there", so beauty is preserved through memory and ultimately the speaker's word.