Pratt starts by arguing with a dictionary. The poem opens on the word "pedestrian," piles up seven synonyms for dullness, quotes a definition ("lacking in liveliness, charm, or surprise"), and then declares that hot flashes are the opposite. That definition becomes the poem's skeleton. The second stanza answers the charges of liveliness and charm, and the third takes on surprise. By the end, every accusation has been addressed.
The first stanza reads like a mock advertisement. The two lists of adjectives are the same length, seven words each, but they sound different. The negatives run together without commas ("dull colorless drab humdrum lackluster stodgy uninspired") so they drone, enacting the flatness they describe. The positives get commas and a beat apiece: "pointed, chromatic, vivid, symphonic, flavorful, fresh, animating." They also draw on the senses, with colour, music and taste all crowded into one line. The similes that follow climb from volcano to wildfire, then shrink to blowtorch, blast furnace and bunsen burner, as if the heat were moving from the landscape into the workshop and the school lab. The aside "who knows?–even gold" is a wink, but it also suggests that fire refines as well as destroys. The last simile is the gentlest: a balloon "drifting slow / above orchards, over fields of ripened corn." Ripeness quietly anticipates the fertility the final stanza mourns.
The second stanza turns to comedy, and the verbs do the work: fanning, opening, rolling, peeling, flap, throw, leap. The lines are short and domestic, full of sheets, quilts, cats and sleeping partners who wake "amazed." The speaker's self-mockery is brisk ("aged strippers gone mad") and gets in before anyone else's laughter can. Opening windows to "let in the blowing snow" sets the heat against winter, and the snow fits the December date given with the poem. The stanza ends on "the charming girlish flush," a compliment that is half joke and half sincere. A flash of youth really does appear on a "tired face," and the closing question mark leaves it unclear whether the speaker is teasing or tender.
The third stanza changes register. The sentences get plainer: "What is happening? we cry." Menopause is ranked beside "birth or love or death," a list joined by repeated "or"s, as though these were the only comparable thresholds. Then comes the poem's quietest loss: fertility "gone with the scirocco." A scirocco is a hot wind, so the heat celebrated in stanza one is also what carries something away. The parenthesis in "a flash (or two)" is one last joke, but it is a thin one, and the mirror scene that follows is serious. The women expected to see "our mothers'" faces, and the years have skipped a generation to "our grandmothers'." The faces are "gaping in wonder" at each other, so astonishment runs both ways across the glass. The poem ends on "eyes that are strangely, still, our very own." The commas around "still" slow the line to a halt after all the lists and rushing verbs.
There is no rhyme, and none is needed. The free verse moves from long, breathless catalogues to short comic bursts to a closing sentence that stretches out and settles. The pronouns matter too. "We," "us" and "our" appear throughout, so the experience belongs to a group, and the reader is brought inside it.
The poem matters because it takes a subject that often gets mumbled about and treats it with both wit and nerve. The humor is not an escape from the feeling. It is how the speaker keeps her footing while the body changes without asking. The dictionary's vocabulary for decline turns out to be wrong, yet the poem does not claim that nothing is lost. Its last image suggests that however startling the reflection, the person looking out through the eyes is still the same.