"I stopped asking" is a strange way to begin, because it starts after the questions are over. We never learn what the speaker used to ask, or of whom. The title, "Year Without," is just as unfinished. Without what? The poem never says, and that silence is part of its method. The reader meets someone who has already come through a period of wanting answers and has arrived at a calmer, plainer view of things.
That view is stated at once, in flat, almost blunt lines: "Things happen anyway, / we stay or go: / never what I think." The colon matters. It works like an equals sign, so that "we stay or go" is explained by "never what I think." Events, and the choices to remain or leave, follow their own course and ignore the speaker's predictions. The pronoun shifts from "I" to "we" in the middle of this, as if the speaker is widening the claim to cover everyone. Judging by the tone, it comes from experience, and it sounds neither angry nor self-pitying.
Then comes the turn: "And yet," alone on its own line. The poem pauses on this hinge, and the pause lets the reader feel a small lift before the sentence goes on. What follows is carefully hedged: "there is a kind of love." The words "a kind of" lower the claim. This is not grand romantic love, and the poem does not say whose love it is or who it is for. Notice too that the sentence has no "I" or "we" in it. Love simply exists, like weather or terrain, which fits a speaker who has stopped trying to control outcomes.
The rest of the poem is a single extended image. Love is "a river slow as Everglades / moving through sawgrass." The Everglades is a vast, flat wetland where water spreads across the land instead of racing down a channel. That makes it a precise choice, because the next lines are "Not deep, but wide." Most poems praise love for its depth, as something to dive into or drown in. This one values breadth: love that covers a lot of ground and is shallow enough to wade through. The sawgrass adds a note of roughness, so the landscape is not sentimental. The sound of the line helps here, since the long vowels and sibilants of "slow," "Everglades" and "sawgrass" stretch the line out, and it slows to match what it describes.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It is free verse built from short, plain lines. The rhythm changes with the content, though. The opening lines are clipped and brief, like someone who has stopped explaining. Mid-poem, the line about the river runs longer and the pace eases. The pair "flood sometimes, / sometimes dry" is neatly mirrored, with the word order reversed across the line break. The speaker is honest that this love has no steady level. It rises and falls, and the symmetry of the phrasing suggests the speaker has accepted both states equally.
The final image is the most modest in the poem: "most days enough / to float the canoe." Each word is worth a look. "Most days" admits that some days fail. "Enough" is the poem's key word, and it is not an apology. It sets a quiet standard against all that asking. A canoe is a small, human-sized craft, and it only has to float. The poem does not promise that it will go anywhere in particular, and that fits a speaker who no longer expects things to go as thought.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it refuses. It does not pretend that loss or uncertainty can be argued away, and it does not offer a big consoling revelation. It finds a measured kind of hope by lowering the scale: not deep, but wide, and enough to float on. In thirteen short lines it suggests that survival, and even contentment, can come from knowing what a love can and cannot carry.