Nobody gives a home address quite like this. Barbara Moraff's speaker lives at "a waterfall / & grove of young / pines," keeps company with stallions, and spends her spare time in "a thin white dress." In seven short lines she sketches a whole persona: free, playful, at home in wild places, and answerable to no one. The central idea is self-definition. She tells us who she is by where she lives and what she does for fun, and she leaves out the usual things such as a name, a history or an explanation.
The opening phrase, "in a hip song mistress," is deliberately slippery. It can be read as the speaker introducing herself as the mistress of a hip song, or as a title she gives herself. "Hip" brings in the cool, offhand idiom of slang, while "mistress" is a loaded word. It usually describes a woman defined by a man, but here it is turned around, since a mistress can also be someone with mastery over something, in this case song. The next line plays on a second double meaning. An "address" is a place to live, but it is also a spoken address, a speech. The speaker's address is a waterfall, something that never stops talking, so her home and her voice seem to be the same thing. This is an inference from the wording, but the poem's sound supports it. "Mistress" and "address" echo each other, and the final word, "dress," completes the pattern. The poem begins and ends on the same sound, which gives such a loose, casual piece a quiet sense of closure.
The line breaks do a lot of work. "& grove of young" stops on an adjective, and then "pines" is left alone on its own line, the shortest in the poem. A pine tree is the obvious reading, but "pines" is also a verb meaning to long for something. The single word sits there carrying both meanings, and the surrounding lines make clear which one the speaker rejects. She does not pine. She is the opposite of the yearning figure that "mistress" might first suggest, and the line is isolated so we can feel that denial.
Then comes the poem's boldest claim: "i amuse myself with stallions." Stallions are powerful, wild and male, and the verb "amuse" shrinks all of that to the scale of a pastime. The speaker is not tamed by the stallions or even impressed by them. They are her entertainment. The next line, "& sport occasionally," keeps the same tone. "Sport" suggests play, flirtation and a little mischief, and "occasionally" makes it sound almost lazy, as if this kind of freedom were routine for her. Whether the stallions are real animals, lovers, or a mixture of both is left open, and the poem gains from the ambiguity. Either way, the balance of power sits with her.
The last image, "a thin white dress," is the gentlest in the poem. White suggests lightness and even innocence, and "thin" suggests something delicate, barely there, perhaps close to see-through. Placed beside a waterfall, it also evokes spray and wet fabric, though that is the reader's inference, not something the poem states. The image sets softness against the strength of the stallions and adds a hint of vulnerability, yet the speaker never sounds vulnerable. She seems to choose how much she shows.
The poem's form matches its attitude. Everything is lowercase, even the pronoun "i," and the ampersands replace "and" twice, so the page looks quick and unfussy. There is no punctuation, so the lines run on like casual speech or an improvised riff, which fits the word "hip." The lines swell and shrink, from the long eight-syllable "my address is a waterfall" down to the single word "pines," then back out again, the way a speaker's breath might move.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with so little. It is a self-portrait that refuses to justify itself, and it reverses a familiar role for women without any argument. Its title, "Four Poems 1," marks it as the first in a group, and it works well as an opening gesture: a speaker announcing her address, her voice and her terms in one breath.