Four lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still the poem manages to sound like a man looking down at his own life with a raised eyebrow. Its title, "Preparations", promises readiness, but the poem is stranger than that. It begins with ordinary winter planning and ends with a marriage made of paper, as if getting ready for the cold had turned into something else.
The first couplet reads like a quick inventory: "a black coat for winter / old as the fashion for a calf's head boiled". The coat is sensible and sombre, and the comparison that follows makes it faintly comic. A boiled calf's head is a dish from a distant kitchen, so the simile suggests the coat belongs to another era, or that the speaker does. Notice the grammar, too. Because the lines have no verb, they work like a list or a note to self, and the reader has to supply what is being prepared. The black also matters. It suggests mourning and seriousness, and later it contrasts with the white of the paper.
The second couplet turns everything upside down. "has the art of subtraction set me up / with my wife of paper" can be read as a single sentence running on from the first couplet, but it also works as a question with the question mark removed: has subtraction set me up with a paper wife? "Set me up" is a deliberately slippery phrase. It can mean a matchmaker's introduction, a trick played on someone, or simply the way a table is laid before a meal, which quietly echoes the calf's head. Subtraction takes the place of the matchmaker, and it is an odd one. Arithmetic usually means removing things and being left with less, so the phrase hints that the wife is what remains after something has been taken away.
That makes "wife of paper" the poem's central image, and it is deliberately open. One reading is the paper-doll or paper-cutout figure, made by cutting away everything that isn't her, which would literally be "the art of subtraction". Another is that she lives only on the page, as a memory or a poem. If so, the poem might be quietly about loss, with a real person reduced to something thin, flat and easily torn. I can't know whether it is autobiographical, and the text doesn't say, so these are readings rather than facts. What the words do show is a speaker who has been left with a substitute and accepts it with a dry, almost deadpan acceptance.
The poem's shape supports this. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly six, ten, ten, six, so the longer lines sit in the middle and the shorter ones frame them, like a folded sheet. There is no rhyme, but the sounds still connect. The hard k sounds of "black coat" and "calf" give the first couplet a clipped, stiff feel, like cloth. In the second couplet the softer p of "up" and "paper" lets the poem trail off quietly, and "wife" and "paper" end the poem on two light, brittle words. The enjambment between "set me up" and "with my wife of paper" makes the reader hang for a moment before the surprise arrives, so the paper wife lands almost as a punchline.
That mixture of comedy and sadness is what makes the poem worth reading. It never explains its feelings. It simply sets a heavy winter coat beside a wife who would burn or tear easily, and leaves the reader to feel the distance between them. The first couplet is all solid, practical objects, while the second drifts into abstraction and fantasy, as though the speaker's preparations were for something no coat could help with.
For a student, the poem shows how much a few words can do when they are chosen carefully. Take away the punctuation and the story, and the reader has to do the work: deciding whether "subtraction" means grief, craft or both, and deciding how much to laugh. Its coldness is partly a pose, and the black coat, the antique dish and the paper figure all suggest a person bracing himself against winter, with a joke as his only protection.