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

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.

Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

Poems are always interested in what Ivan Illich called 'shadow work,' not least because that is no small part of their own way of working.

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.