Pratt's poem opens with a command: "Watch." Before we get any explanation, we are told to look at the words as things in motion, "these shapes / on the page." The wide gap in the middle of "my words" makes the point at once. The poem treats space on the page as a physical thing, and its words behave less like statements than like movements. I know nothing reliable about the author or about who "Pina" is, so I'll stay with the text. The title suggests a letter, one part of a longer sequence. The vocabulary of "tilt," "pivot," "orient" and "placement" suggests dance or some other rehearsed physical movement, and perhaps a body that has to work out its own way of moving. The poem never says which, and that openness is part of its strength.
The central idea is the effort of starting over. "Tilt, pivot, zig zag, tilt" works like a count of beats, and it comes back again and again, each time followed by a small concession: "give the back a break," then "give the head a break." The body is being negotiated with. Around these lines the text steps down and across the page in a staircase of indentations, so the reader's eye does the tilting and pivoting too.
The most inventive stretch is the long refrain, "And circle into self to adjust placement to start again." It is repeated, but never exactly. In one pass the speaker circles "into heart" instead of "self," a single slip that suggests the circling is emotional as well as physical. Then a line break splits "place / meant," so that "placement" becomes a place *meant* to start again. A few lines later "adjust" has worn down to "just": "again / to just the place to / start again." The phrase is smoothed by repetition the way a pebble is smoothed by water, and it ends up plainer and quieter. Where we might expect a neat resolution, the poem gives us the process of arriving at a place that is just enough.
Then the speaker corrects the whole performance in three clipped pieces: "I mean / to start. / Again." The full stops are small stumbles, and they sound like someone insisting on a simple fact after all the circling. Beginning is the achievement, and beginning "again" is the harder one.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its music comes from repetition and from short, heavily stressed words, such as "tilt," "zig zag," "head," "start." The word "again" appears so often that it works like a rhyme without sounding like one, a sound the poem keeps coming back to.
The second half changes direction. "My path is on the outside track" brings in a running image, and the outside track is the longest way around. "I'm carried in the head, not the leg" then turns the body's logic upside down: the head leads, and the legs follow. The word "head" begins one line after another ("head through the space in the arm, / head towards the left shoulder, / head resting on the neck"), until the body seems to be reduced to this one weighty part. The sequence ends on "head down," which could mean exhaustion, concentration or a bow, and the poem lets all three stand.
The most moving shift is in the speaker's tone. The poem begins with "Watch," a demand for attention. By the end it has become "Look at me, if possible," where the polite "if possible" shows how much has changed. The speaker is asking now, and unsure of the answer. The final request, "Hold my head while / I circle into self / to start again," moves from looking to touching. The speaker does not ask for rescue or for an end to the circling, only for someone to steady the head while it continues.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It turns the page into a space where the form acts out the subject: the stepped lines, the worn-down refrain and the gaps all carry the effort of a body adjusting itself. It also suggests that persistence is not always graceful, and that it sometimes depends on another person's willingness to watch, and then to hold.