The poem runs on a single number and refuses to let it settle. “14 footers (or inchers)” is the parenthesis that sets the tone, and it never stops paying off — the gator is fourteen feet, the swimmer’s shoe is a size fourteen, and the aside about inches keeps the innuendo running underneath the whole poem without any line ever committing to it. That doubleness is the piece’s engine. Everything can be read twice, and the poem is careful never to force either reading.

The swamp itself is well made. “Warm, steaming, seductive swamp / beneath the moonlit reeds / where frogs hum / and crickets tune their legs” is genuinely good nature writing before it is anything else. Crickets do produce sound by rubbing their legs, so “tune their legs” is accurate as well as suggestive, and the humid nocturnal setting is built from real detail rather than atmosphere. The comedy works because the observation underneath it is sound.

The shoe business is the poem’s best sequence. “My size 14 shoes / are too small— / sucked off by the mud, / left standing / in my socks.” The shoes remaining upright in the muck while the man walks out of them is a precise piece of physical comedy, and “left standing / in my socks” is the exact image of undignified vulnerability the next line then names outright.

“Dignity?” — one word, a question mark, its own line. The poem stops to ask, and immediately answers by giving dignity away entirely: “Just / chomp me. / Take the shoes. / Leave the socks.” Offering yourself to the alligator, and negotiating terms about footwear while doing it, is the funniest moment in the piece. The surrender is total and the man is still haggling.

The turn at the end is what lifts this above a comic sketch. “My lady cricket— / a siren serenading me with / mystery and allure.” The whole swamp resolves into a courtship. The cricket tuning its legs in line seven becomes a siren by the last stanza, and the danger the poem opened with — gators, mating season, being chomped — turns out to have been desire the entire time. The siren also connects this to “Safety is a Naming” from two weeks earlier, where the siren’s song was reclassified from shipwreck to safety. Here the same figure returns in a swamp, played for comedy rather than reverence, but doing the same work: the dangerous song is the appealing one.

Comic verse with real craft under the jokes. The sustained size-fourteen pun could have worn thin and instead keeps finding new places to land — gator, shoe, and the parenthetical inch that colors everything. The poem never spells out the innuendo, which is exactly why it works; a cruder version would have stated what this one lets the reader supply.

The swamp writing is better than the comedy strictly requires. “Crickets tune their legs” is accurate entomology doing double duty as suggestion, and the moonlit-reeds setting is genuinely atmospheric before it turns funny. That grounding is what separates this from a novelty poem.

“Take the shoes. / Leave the socks” is the best line — surrender and haggling in the same breath.

Against the shorter draft from two days earlier, this is clearly the finished version. The draft had the gators, the swamp, and the size-14 joke; this one adds the sound design, the shoes standing in the mud, and the cricket-siren turn that gives the poem an actual arc rather than just a punchline. The one soft spot is the final stanza’s “mystery and allure,” which states plainly what the siren image had already implied — the poem’s only lapse into telling.