[I tried early moving] I’ve recently been thinking of the sentence fragment as a record of exhaustion—what happens when you can’t quite finish a thought, or can only catch a glimpse of some half-formed idea inexplicably protruding from the dense fog of your mind. Jane Huffman’s “[I tried early moving]” enacts this fatigued syntax. The poem opens with a subject and predicate, but swiftly dissembles into less conventional grammar. A sentence, Huffman’s poem reminds me, is at once a temporal and grammatical unit. The productive day demands the orderly, sequential structure of a sentence; to mess meaning is to mess time. The poem, tired by order, searches for a different kind of temporality—one “[b]efore the day could hide away its time”—and finds a zone where basic distinctions don’t pertain, where “night is so much like day.” Here, words bleed into one another like dye into water.