One Word

That slight, sweet surprise a poem can give you sometimes, by choosing a word that just isn't quite what you were expecting. Seán Rafferty in the poem beginning "I would be Adam" (he tended not to title them). It ends with his proposed improvement on the Almighty's plan:

    He should have held his breath.
    Five days was plenty.
    Earth, sea, beasts, fowl, then feet up.

    Make feathers fly and finish.

    Peacocks.
    Full stop.

    Peacocks was really great.

That last line; that verb. Not "peacocks were", because it's the idea of peacocks that was really great. Once read, never forgotten...

Then the opening of the first poem in Peter Riley's pamphlet Pennine Tales:

    Red flicker through the trees. The last minibus
    leaves from the station.

This one works by misleading the reader as to grammar: if we read "red" as a noun and "flicker" as a verb, as is fairly natural in readers used to sentences with verbs in, we at once find that their number does not agree. We read "red flicker" expecting "red flickers" and must then go back and see adjective-noun rather than noun-verb. And hardly have we got our head round that, when the innocent-looking real verb "leaves", in the next sentence, returns our minds inevitably to the trees and turns verb into noun, singular into plural, the red flicker of the bus into autumn leaves falling…

Or another opening; Paul Henry in "Ring", from Boy Running (Seren):

    I can't get the ring out of my finger.

You read, think no, I must have misread that; must be "off", not "out of", go back and realise you didn't. Then the next lines make all clear: it's the indentation the ring's absence leaves:

    How long till it disappears,
    this ghost ring, twenty years deep?

All these have in common not just the surprise element but the requirement for the reader to do a bit of extra work, to think harder. I think it is what makes them memorable; it's what we find out for ourselves that sticks in the mind.