The more I think about Ms. Ball's poem, the more it jells in my mind. I like it. It gives the effect (intentionally and, I think, well) of a mind starting off in an organized way about the objective beauty of a lonely place...

Here there are places remarkable
for how no one ever comes—no asphalt,
no people, no trivia:

only hills, creeks, cattle.

...and then going off on one subjective tangent or another (this one is wryly humorous)...

Some irritating prairie dogs protected
by environmental urgency,
who are interesting,
even comic, even as they
wreck the place.

...and then returning to more organized and reverent thoughts, only to go off on other tangents...

I hope you get to live somewhere like this,
so much yourself you could take charge
of such a solid stand of hills,
you could receive this holy light,
keen and fleeting.

At every moment the valley brimming,
the valley empty.

—Though you are nearly always happy,
and this place does not seem happy.

Happiness is for
******************—what? whom?

The one wish, it is my one wish.

Offhand, I'd say the parent finds herself (I will assume the narrator is a mother; the tone is right) wishing for her son the happiness that she has somehow missed (the place reminds her of this lack).

This next bit took a while for me to understand:

Oh, you're such a ham, who would you amuse—

the horse, the white horse on his hill?

Again another tangent, provoked by the actions of her child (I assume it is a boy, but I could be mistaken). There is a mythic quality suggested by the white horse on the hill, which would be worth exploring for possible implications. For all of that, these lines close the poem definitively and leave the reader both thinking and feeling something worthwhile.

Not everyone likes free verse, but I think that for once we have a Pinsky Pick in which the capabilities and limitations of the genre are used well. The breaks in spacing and indentations are (again for once) evocative of emotions and of changes in thought patterns, such that the reader doesn't have to use a mental machete to hack his way through the form to get to the function. (I don't know about you, but I find that sort of thing mentally exhausting.)

I am not at all sure that putting this poem's ideas into rhyme and meter would work nearly so well. People don't think and feel in rhyme and meter, and this poem is designed to express naked thoughts and emotions (as it were). If the Emperor is unclothed this time, it's merely because he's sunbathing. His isn't the most handsome figure ever seen -- some parts of the poem seem awkward in their expression, yet I infer that this is intentional -- but at least he isn't parading downtown expecting everyone to call him something he isn't.

In my parody I expressed the idea that the poem should've ended sooner, right about here:

I hope you get to live somewhere like this,
so much yourself you could take charge
of such a solid stand of hills,
you could receive this holy light,
keen and fleeting. (...)

I will now say that I was probably wrong in that judgment. It's just that I like organization and closure in poetry -- yet neither quality fits the thoughts and emotions we are following here, not until the very end. That too is intentional.

The following paradox could be taken as a gentle "sound and fury signifying nothing", or (yet again paradoxically) as rather profound and meaningful in its wordplay:

At every moment the valley brimming,
the valley empty.

Brimming with what? "Empty" one can see, but one can read all sorts of interesting things into "brimming" (beauty, light, wonder in the eyes of the beholder, etc.).

Normally I'd be the second (after the worthy Foobs) to jump all over a Pinsky Pick for the conceit of breaking the normal rules of grammar and syntax, but (again for once) this poem seems to pull it off -- precisely because it doesn't try too hard to make a point thereby and because it doesn't break the rules simply for the sake of breaking the rules.

wr ()()