I like them both

Comments

I think gaping blades too worn a phrasing and I wonder if you need old life at all

 The end of that poem is really powerful: I wonder if you have played more with the form: truncating the last stanza or shaping the poem like Herbert's Easter Wings 

The second poem might be the ambitious one:  I wonder if you know Alan Grossman's work: he is very fond of those repeated phrasing -- beyond the light . . . light, etc.  Frank Bidart does it too: there is a night within the NIGHT: I am sucker for that effect, I guess.

 I guess I still have formal tendencies because I don't like the massive first stanza with longish lines and then these shorter more clipped lines and ends of other lives strikes me as tired phrasing, too.

But these are real poems, and facing each other on opp pages they would work well together.  But I'm like Lowell, Sad friend you cant rearrange or derange your poems anymore . . . as Bishop wrote.