Anyone who has learned the alphabet knows the vowels as a chanted row: A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y. Mary F. C. Pratt takes that classroom rule and gives each letter a color, a texture, and sometimes a taste or a smell. The title, "Vowels with Megan," recalls Rimbaud's sonnet "Voyelles," which also assigns colors to the vowels. But Pratt's sightings are small and particular: things you might find on a winter walk or in a bowl of apples.
The structure is a quiet trick. Each stanza opens with its vowel, in order, but the letter is hidden inside the first word: "A shaft," "Eel," "I am," "O luminous." The alphabet works like scaffolding that the reader gradually notices. The spelling then starts to play. In "YoU are fresh and blue," the capitals make the letter U stand up inside the pronoun, so the vowel's name and the word "you" are the same sound. "I" works the same way, a letter and a self at once. The last stanza pushes the pun furthest: "And Y is it sometimes silver" can be heard as "And why is it," so the letter and the question arrive together.
The imagery is precise. The first stanza lets its orange light break into a gray day just as the line breaks do: "before the end of" hangs open at the line's edge before "a long gray day" fills in the gap. The E stanza joins two things that shouldn't fit, "Eel black, luminescent," a dark animal that glows. The slow "thick green river" carries it along. The I stanza is a self-portrait: "winter-pale peach, / being, thatched with white and black." Judging by the imagery, this could be pale skin and graying hair, though the poem never says so. The oddly placed "being" suggests that existing is the only action this speaker claims. The letter I is also a thin upright stroke, and "thatched" gives it a texture like straw or hair.
With the O, the poem becomes round and edible. The letter's shape matches the fruit, and the apple names, "Mutsu, Greening, unripe Mac," make a short list that steps down from two lilting names to a clipped one. "Unripe" is a good choice, because it lets the green taste sour. "Luminous" echoes "luminescent" from the eel, so the glowing links two vowels that otherwise look nothing alike. Then the senses cross over: the U is "fresh and blue, / tinged with the scent / of summer clover." A color is given a smell, and the poem turns from "I" to "you." The title suggests company, so Megan may be the person addressed, but the poem leaves that open.
The Y stanza is the only question, and it ends the poem on uncertainty. Its colors, "silver" and "jade," are the only mineral ones, and they keep "flickering just on the edge / of visible light." This circles back to the "shaft of orange light" at the start. The poem opens with light arriving and closes at the limit of seeing it. The vowel that is only sometimes a vowel gets the colors that won't settle.
There is no rhyme, and the line lengths vary freely, from a single clipped phrase to a stretched, open-ended sentence. Instead of end-rhyme, the poem repeats words and sounds: "green" appears in the river and the apple, "black" in the eel and the speaker, "light" at the start and the finish, and "sometimes silver" hisses softly at the close. The seasons are scrambled rather than sorted: a gray day, a winter-pale speaker, early-autumn apples, summer clover. The dateline, December 12, 2006, sits comfortably beside the winter imagery, but the poem says nothing more about when or why it was made.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with a simple game. A rule we memorize without thinking becomes a way of describing a person, a place, and a relationship. Each letter turns out to have a different sensory life, and the poem admits at the end that language, like light, has an edge where certainty gives way to flicker.