Before the poem has said a word, its title has already hesitated. "When Deciding.... For Some Time" trails off in four dots instead of three, and the first line repeats the opening words, as though the speaker has started the thought twice and still can't finish it. That stalling is the poem's real subject: the dead time between wanting to change and actually moving, and what a person notices while stuck there.
The first eleven lines form a single unpunctuated sentence, and its main verb, "turns," doesn't arrive until the tenth line. The reader is made to wait, which is exactly what the poem is about. The sentence opens with a decision "to change / from sorrow to sorrow," a phrase that cancels its own hope. Nothing is escaped; one grief is traded for another. The moon repeats this in miniature. It is "attracted / by cloud to cloud," drifting from one patch to the next. The moon decides nothing, it is simply pulled, and next to that passive drifting the speaker's "deciding" sounds more and more like wishful thinking. The strange phrase "the cuticle of the moon" belongs here too. A cuticle is the thin pale rim at the base of a fingernail, so the image suggests a slender crescent, but it also brings something small and bodily into the sky, so that the moon seems like a sliver of the speaker's own skin.
Then the poem lowers its gaze. What "turns my eyes / from the wind" is "more of a man's back / than his face in a pool / of old age in a hollow / dead with waiting." The grammar is knotty, and I suspect deliberately so. We see the man mostly from behind, with only a glimpse of a reflected face, and the words gather around him (pool, old age, hollow) as if he were settling into a low place in the ground. A hollow is both a dip in the land and an emptiness. "Dead with waiting" could describe the man, the hollow, or the old age itself, and the poem refuses to choose. I read the wind as the outward pull of weather and change, so the speaker's eyes turning away from it is a turn toward stillness.
The final section changes scene. "Men who returning / from an empty catch / are distant figures." Judging by the word "catch," these may be fishermen, though the poem never says so. Again there are no faces, only far-off shapes, and the phrasing is oddly built, with "returning" left hanging before the verb arrives, like men who never quite get home. Then comes the surprise. The speaker welcomes not these failed returners but "those who are / waiting." The qualification "although / still distant" matters, because the gap doesn't close and the poem doesn't pretend it does. The word "waiting" first appeared in the phrase "dead with waiting"; now it ends the whole poem, and the same word receives a welcome. The *w* sounds of "wind," "waiting" and "welcome" quietly tie these moments together.
Formally, this is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines are short, usually two to five words, and many end on small unfinished words such as "from," "of," "by," "than" and "in," so the reader leans across each line break to find the sense. The shifting indentation lets the poem drift across the page. The only music comes from repetition: "sorrow to sorrow" and "cloud to cloud" both describe movement that lands where it began. By the last stanza the language has thinned to plain statement ("I welcome"), as if the fog of qualification has briefly cleared.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses the easy consolation. The decision is never made and the sorrow is never lifted. What it offers is smaller and, I think, more believable: recognition across a distance. Waiting stops being only a kind of death and becomes a shared condition, something one person can acknowledge in another without either of them having to arrive anywhere.