Seriously, Laura Polley's poem has been parsed up, down and sideways and hardly needs more analysis by me. I did find it thought-provoking, though a tad obscure. I'm grateful that those with sharper intuitions for such things picked up on a few points that I found somewhat puzzling.

The poem caused me to remember the time in my own childhood when I had a cat, Cozy, a giant long-haired Persian. He got into a fight with another cat, got infected, and had to be put to sleep too. His fur was falling out in clumps as well.

I put in my mock title because my first reaction to the poem was "meh". It looked like something (at first) that was pretty much thrown together. Having thought about the meaning and read others' thoughts about it, I see that the truth is quite otherwise. Yet though I'm probably speaking from completely personal bias, the style and the tone of "Winter Accident" just didn't and still don't do very much for me. There's no energy even in the grief expressed by the poem. The prosaic language and blocky free-verse style don't allow for such expression.

Now maybe that's the point -- maybe the distance of the mother in the relationship is what drains the energy, and several have commented one way or another as to how that might be so. But while this detachment makes for accurate journalism, it doesn't make for effective poetry. At least rave a bit about the mother's detachment, for pity's sake!

Even if I had the time this week, though, I wouldn't want to satirize the Tuesday Poem this time around. Its subject matter deserves that much respect.

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By Laura Polley
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2008, at 6:50 AM ET

Listen to Laura Polley read this poem.

We brought the dog home in the trunk.

All the way from school Dad said she was
back there, feet on the same red carpet as mine.

The February sun made me feel like a thief.

You're not part of this memory. Your figure is missing
from the strange gray half-light of the closed garage
where he tried but couldn't shut her eyes, Siberian blue,
where we stood, two blunderers, not knowing what to do
with the clumps of dead fur coming off in our hands.

One week before your birthday. You must be inside
washing dishes by hand, or wringing your prayers.
You must be respecting the father's collapse, his soft
exterior caving in like cake, the daughter's undoing
in one afternoon a dozen years of ladylike calm.

You must be delegating comfort to the saints.

You must be imagining we need you this way.