Exercise 2: Trying to Remember

(Again from Tony Hoagland's The Art of Voice)
"Uncertainty may seem like an odd quality to cultivate in a poetic voice, but in fact our unsureness about what we think, see, feel and remember is one of the most convincing dimensions of a human voice. 

One of the ways of getting uncertainty on the page is through syntactical methods. Repetition, hesitation, self-revision, stutter, questions, self-interruption - these are a few of the devices for showing the speaker working through the effort of thinking.

...

[Use Caryl Pagel's poem "Old Wars"] as your model and write in the voice of a speaker trying to recall an event from the past or trying to figure something out about another person.

Her answer still stirs a spark
from those ashes swept into
some forgotten corner.
Lying face-up on a Pilates Reformer
staring at the rectangles of a false ceiling
I was at least three oceans away
in a conversation that was combusting
taking this fragile ecosystem within down in flames - wait
how did it begin again?  In the car,
on a rainy day, while navigating concrete
curves like a wavy doodle along the Bohuslan coast,
I think I asked, what do you think of
him? (My husband, of course I knew,
she had given us her blessings at our wedding
it was captured shining in her eyes
across all the photos) So why did I ask?
I was in a state of symbiosis with
my husband which blurred into a fusion -
I was fishing for compliments
not for myself - because that's always harder -
but for the one whose praise I felt entitled to a cut
(like a pimp) I think
that's why I asked,
I felt like basking in his glow,
but her reply dowsed my pride in fuel
and dropped a lit match - You are so lucky
to have found him - did she say that?
I remember the word 'lucky' but
there was more, why did I freeze
then melt or did I burn then freeze
like magma resigning itself to rock -
did she start by saying 'someone like you',
'so difficult', 'only he would put up with it?'
Along those lines although
just a degree of difference in navigation
decides whether the vessel lands or crashes.