Here, words offer a way to take "what upsets us", such as violence done to a bird, and "recast"

it in lines that give upsetting images a new shape that can contain and communicate the
emotions triggered by what the poet sees. At the same time, though, words cannot always
provide such containment, and as they cannot "protect" us from such violence, they are also
something to "escape". In "A Rhyme for Ever", the composite effect of the "gaze" and of words
is a "tearing" of the world into parts; here, in "The Smile Pitiful", words may give form to emotion
caused by already "torn" images, but even when they do so, the desire to "escape" from words
and their failures remains.

Both the formulations in the latter poem present the issue as a problem of "how" to do it. The
implicit question is explicit in the brief "Getting Wind of a Plan":

How can anyone be rain and wind,

that is falling and blowing, and a path on a rock ridge
and rose hip and iron maw
and wings in clear air
and choking on it all at the same time?
for Friederike Mayröcker

The dedication at the end implies an answer to this rhetorical question: if anyone can be so
expansive and all-inclusive, it is Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker, who is fourteen years Erb's
senior. While one might have to know Mayröcker's work to see how it's really done, the question
here does act out an answer: the poem that captures so many distinct images with different
valences can reach for wholeness in a question that brings contradictory elements together. All
the parts may "tear our gaze forever", but the question becomes a suture for that tear that
admits distinctions while also bridging them "at the same time."