Poems are breath-maps

"Poems are breath-maps", says Alice Oswald. "They use punctuation and line-endings to show you how to reach and keep some of the air's invisible energy."

Here is her poem 'Marginalia at the Edge of the Evening'.

now the sound of the trees is worldwide
and I'm still here/not here
at the very lifting edge of evening

and I should be up there. Bathing children.

because it's late, the bike's asleep on its feet,
the fields hang to the sun by slackened lines
and when the wind blows it shows
the evening's underside
(when the sun sinks it takes
a moment smaller than a spider)
I saw the luminous underneath of a moth
I saw a blackbird
mouth to the glow of the hour in hieroglyphics...
who left the light on the clouds?

pause

the man at the wheel signs his speed on the ringroad.

right here in my reach, time is as thick as stone
and as thin as a flying strand
it's night and somebody's
pushing his mower home

  to the moon

Here is a poem which is exactly a breath-map.  It flows so naturally.  Read it aloud to hear your own breathing place the flows and pauses of the poem. 

The poem has an informal, even exploratory feel. 

'and I'm still here/not here
at the very lifting edge of evening'

I love 'the very lifting edge of evening'.  It tells me something intense, something poised on a brink, that sense of crossing a border.  Right from the start, it positions the reader in time.  The evening unfolds, delightfully.

'because it's late, the bike's asleep on its feet,
the fields hang to the sun by slackened lines'

I find these lines curiously visual.  A drowsy leaned-up bicycle. 

Look.  Bicycles asleep.

The field pattern lines of hedge and wall reaching uphill to the sky and a setting sun.  But they are also fantastical, and suggest a moment apart from the everyday.  Time 'is a thick as stone/and as thin as a flying strand' so we can't fix it.  Something measurable has become harder to pin down. 

But then
'it's night and somebody's
pushing his mower home
   to the moon'

It's just an observation.  But playfully ambiguous.  Stay out at dusk and you might see a lunar mower.  Or just bats.

And as a mother myself, I warm to the line -

'and I should be up there.  Bathing children.'

The breath-map coded by the full stop.  Maternal responsibility and stolen time - distraction - all in one dot.