Hi, Vince,

I see in this draft the characteristic attention to detail I’ve come to associate with your poetry. You put such care into the language of your descriptions that it’s clear to me you’re writing to try and capture what feels like being here or there, seeing this, enduring that.

I wanted a bit more context here. While the metaphors you use do the details of the photo, and the setting the photo captures, much justice, they don’t quite get at what’s beneath the experience — the submerged river of emotion the experience carried you along on. “A curtain of endless rain” needs to work harder to reach beneath the experience. Could endless speak to some aspect of the emotions you carried with you out to the beach that day? I’d like to know. I think the poem sits on the surface of something much deeper. Since it carries you along in its wake, the poem, could you perhaps explore what else was going on that day? In your life, others’ lives, the world? What was on your mind? Writing toward some of these subjects may lead you to consider what the details you’ve gathered here mean. K.E. may have it right by pointing you toward elements of the poem that speak of concern for an uncertain future, or drunkenness. I think this is the ticket.

As for your line breaks, I love the way “of a diffuse grey” breaks to “a blanket”. There’s some assonance in the way grey sounds like the rounded “a” sound in blanket. And this is a fine example of annotating through line breaks. A grey sky, which is cool and rain-filled and unwelcoming, suddenly gets a new association by being linked to the blanket, which we usually associate with warmth, or at least with being covered, enshrouded. It’s quite good.

A few of your breaks made me want for more. Sometimes you break in ways that confuses the syntax of the sentence you’re writing through the breaks, like here:

Chill on touch,
soaking
through my skin;
cold onto
the bones mine.

I can’t see a reason for placing the modifier “mine” after “bones”. I’ll bet you have one, and I mention my being puzzled by this choice of yours just to give you a sense that the line struck me as a bit difficult to make sense of. Could it be shortened to “the bones”, “my bones”, or even just “bones”? The poem might gain momentum here by shortening.

Leaving soaking on its own makes sense, but there’s potential to mirror the move you make in lines two and three if you combine “soaking through my skin;” into a single line. Rather than cold, you could follow this up with another metaphor, an unexpected detail, or a direct reference to the emotion interior of the poem. If drinking becomes the core of the poem, what if cold became something particular like gin, or broken bottle glass?

soaking through my skin;
broken bottle glass
piercing into
bone.

I’ll leave go there. I hope I was helpful to you as you work to revise this piece. The image it captures is as haunting as the language you use to render the experience.

If you have any questions, let me know.

And thank you for the feedback on my piece. Your comment was much appreciated. I hadn’t considered a centered layout, but I definitely will.