Almost nothing happens in "Intensity," and that is the trick of it. A woman lies in bed while the sun pours in and wishes a cloud would come around. She gets up, drives to a nearby coffee shop, picks up her "daily dosage of cold coffee" and goes home. The clouds do arrive. She returns to bed, watches them pass "1 by 1," drinks the coffee and smokes her last cigarette. The title promises force, yet the plot delivers a morning of drifting, and the poem lives in the gap between the two. Its central idea, as the text suggests, is that intensity is not always action. It can be the pressure of a day that is too bright and too empty, got through by small rituals.
The imagery works through opposites: glare against shade, heat against cold. "Drowning in the sun" is the boldest phrase. Drowning belongs to water, yet here it is light that swamps her, and the verb makes her someone things happen to rather than someone who acts. Against that weight, the wished-for cloud and the cold coffee line up as two kinds of relief, one cool shade overhead, the other cool in her hand. Even the cigarette fits, if we read a little between the lines. Its smoke is a small cloud of her own making, as though she is not quite willing to wait for the sky.
The structure is a loop. The poem opens in bed, returns there by its fourth line and never really leaves, and the errand in between changes nothing. "Come around" in the first line comes back as "roll around" in the fourth, and the repeated "around" turns the day into a circle. The wish is granted almost at once, but granting it brings no change. She only gets something to look at. Notice, too, the shift from "the cloud" to "Clouds," one wished for and many delivered, followed by the numeral in "1 by 1." Written as a digit rather than a word, it looks like a tally mark, and counting is what people do when they are waiting for time to pass.
The grammar tells its own story. After the opening, "she" gradually disappears: "Gets herself her daily dosage," "Watching the clouds," "Sitting back and relaxing," "Drinking her cold coffee." These fragments have no subject, so she seems to dissolve into the things she does. "Dosage," a medical word, turns coffee into a prescription and the outing into upkeep rather than pleasure. The nonstandard forms, "lays" for "lies" and "drive" for "drives," give the voice an unpressed, offhand feel that suits the mood. Readers will stumble over them, though, and they would be the first thing to check in a revision.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines read like diary entries. Line three is the longest and flattest, a string of actions ending in the anticlimax "and goes home." The lines after it shorten and slow until "Sitting back and relaxing." Sound does some quiet work too. Hard c's click through "cloud," "cold," "coffee" and "cigarette," like a finger tapping on a table, and the d's of "daily dosage" thud with the same dull regularity.
The most loaded word is "last." It may mean the final cigarette in the pack or the last she will ever smoke, and the poem does not say. That uncertainty is where its tension tightens. Beside it, "relaxing" sounds less like peace than like an instruction she is giving herself. The poem is small and a little rough, but it shows how a mood can shape form itself, through a looping structure, a vanishing subject and flat, repeated verbs. It takes a morning most people would call nothing and lets us feel its weight.