I'd say that the middle stanza is closer: that's the place where the poem ranges unexpectedly into a different realm.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

A certain amount of housekeeping also goes on in my poems. I wash doorknobs, do dishes, mop floors, patch carpets, cook.

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned.