Waking in the dark, the speaker of "Uncertain & Afraid" takes a lover's hair for a pile of fallen leaves. The mistake is gentle, but it sets up what the poem keeps circling: the way memory, reasons and certainty slip away the moment you reach for them. The two of them were "collecting" leaves "for reasons / I forgot the instant I tried / to recall them." The poem's central claim grows out of that forgetting. If we can't hold on to why we hurt each other, the only sensible thing left is to forgive, and to do it before the dark closes in.
The imagery comes mostly from autumn. The speaker remembers walking through a forest "admiring the gracious way / that trees decay," and the phrase carries much of the poem's hope. Decay is usually something to dread, but here it looks like a way of letting go with dignity. The tresses-as-leaves image blurs the lover into the landscape, as if the relationship itself were part of that slow, graceful falling. The printed text swaps "the" and "for" in the opening lines, but the sense is still clear: *mistook your tresses for the fallen golden leaves*.
The most interesting comparison comes in the middle. The couple were "fighting / to forgive each other for reasons / we needed / to believe in / without understanding, // like the words of a foreign song / playing in the distance." The simile is quietly precise. You can be moved by a song in a language you don't speak, catching its melody and mood but not its meaning. Forgiveness works like that here: an act of faith in something half-heard. The paradox of "fighting to forgive" shows how hard it is, since even the effort to make peace feels like conflict.
Then the poem turns blunt. "We will die / whether we love each other or not*, / but / without forgiveness / we're all fucked." The swearing breaks the delicate autumn mood on purpose, and the single "but" on its own line works like a hinge. The asterisk after "not" points to a note that isn't on the page, so I won't guess at it, but it does leave a small mark of hesitation. The next image is more violent still: love must wait for hatred and resentment "to be castrated / by humility." The verb is harsh, almost brutal, and it clashes with "gracious" decay. The poem seems to suggest that humility is not soft. It is a cutting-away, and it has to happen before love can proceed.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme or steady metre. Its rhythm comes from the page itself. Lines are pushed across the page in staggered indents, so the reader hesitates where the speaker would, and ellipses ("recall them… // …all that") make the thoughts trail off and then pick up again. The ampersands, repeated from the title onward, give it the feel of something written quickly at night. The tone is conversational, even confessional, and the direct address ("Do you remember last Autumn?") makes the reader overhear one half of an intimate exchange.
The final movement is the most tender. "All we have are voices / defenceless / against the night" admits how little protection words offer. What helps instead is touch: "when the weight of you body / presses against me / the darkness ceases to be / so deep." Notice the careful wording, though. The darkness is not banished, only made less deep. The poem never promises more than that.
It ends on questions rather than conclusions, which fits a title that names two uncertain feelings. "So will you wait for me, / & can we // forgive ourselves?" The shift from "each other" to "ourselves" is the real surprise. Forgiving a partner turns out to be the easier task, and the harder one is turning that mercy inward. Leaving the question hanging, with "& can we" stranded in its own spaced-out line, lets the speaker stay honest. What makes the poem worth reading is that it doesn't pretend forgiveness is simple. It treats it as a fragile, half-understood act of faith, made with mortality in plain view and a body close in the dark.