Ten words or so, and a kazoo: Elin Paulson's «With Love Still 3», dated 8/20/62, gives a reader very little and still manages to suggest an entire evening. The speaker says that they did tell someone things, and that the two of them then played their kazoos. That is the whole event. What the poem is about, I think, is the strange pairing of the serious and the silly, the way intimacy can mean confiding and clowning in the same breath.
Start with the first line, "i did tell you things." The little word "did" matters. Nobody needs "did" in a plain statement, so it sounds as if the speaker is answering a doubt, perhaps a complaint that nothing was ever shared. That is an inference from the phrasing, not a known fact, but the emphasis is hard to ignore. Then there is "things," the vaguest noun available. We never learn whether these were secrets, worries or small daily news. The poem keeps the content of the confession private, so the reader is left in the position of someone who knows a conversation happened but wasn't in the room.
The second and third lines turn sharply. The ampersand in "& we played" is a casual, hurried way of joining two actions, and it treats the confession and the music as equals, with no pause for solemnity between them. "Played" is also a loaded verb. It can mean making music, but it also means games and childhood, and it makes the evening sound lighter than the first line promised. The final noun, "our kazoos," completes the swerve. A kazoo is about the least dignified instrument there is. It has no keys or strings, and you hum into it and your voice comes out as a buzz. There is a quiet irony in that, since the speaker has just been talking, using a voice, and now the two of them hand that voice over to a toy that disguises it. Perhaps the music says what the "things" couldn't. Perhaps it only covers the awkwardness afterward. The poem doesn't choose, and that openness is its best feature.
The word "our" deserves a second look. It would have been easy to write "the kazoos" or just "kazoos." Instead each person owns an instrument, and the possessive turns a throwaway detail into a shared history, a pair of objects that belong to this friendship or love and no one else's.
The sound and shape of the poem do quiet work too. There is no rhyme and no punctuation apart from the slash after the first line, a mark that looks like a line break written out and that appears only once, so the poem seems half-quoted from something longer. The lines shrink from five syllables to three to three, which gives the feeling of a sentence running out of breath. Both "things" and "kazoos" end in a buzzing plural, so the first line quietly rhymes in spirit with the last, and the closing word lands on a stressed, almost comic "-zoos." Because there is no full stop, the poem doesn't close so much as trail off, as if the kazoos were still playing. The lowercase "i" adds to this, making the voice sound private, like a note or a line from a letter.
The title adds another layer. "With Love Still" reads like a sign-off, the words that end a letter, and "still" can mean "even now" or "motionless." Both meanings fit a poem about a moment that has passed but hasn't been let go. The "3" suggests this is one piece in a numbered series, though from this text alone I can't say what the others do, and I won't guess.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It risks sentimentality, since confiding and love are heavy subjects, and then deflates it with a toy instrument, which makes the feeling more believable, not less. Real closeness often looks like this: something said, something left unsaid, and then a ridiculous noise that two people make together. The poem is small, but it leaves room for a reader's own memory to fill in the things that were told.