Nathaniel S. Rounds’s “You There” begins not with a person but with a body already being read like a medical chart: “Laugh lines and signs of failing liver / Wrinkles and knobby belly.” Those details are intimate but not tender; they are evidence. Laugh lines, which usually record joy, sit beside organ failure so that living and deterioration become the same record. The poem is about what happens when decay intrudes on a space made for pleasure: the body is treated not as a person to be saved or mourned but as litter to be cleared away, while the music plays on.
The central pressure comes from the collision between the dance floor and the corpse. A dance floor is supposed to hold vitality, rhythm, youth, desire. Instead it receives what the poem calls “a dry leaf,” an image of autumn brittleness and weightlessness. The simile is exact: a dry leaf does not fall heavily; it crumples, twists, becomes almost indistinguishable from litter. That same logic turns the man, a few lines later, into a “dry corpse,” and the speaker asks for a janitor rather than a doctor or a friend. The word “janitor” does the poem’s coldest work. It means the body has become a maintenance problem, something to be swept out of the way.
Rhythmically, the poem moves from slow assessment to efficient command. The opening lines are full of heavy, plain nouns—liver, wrinkles, belly—and they pause over each sign. Then the second stanza stretches a little: the repeated “child” creates a nursery-like echo, but the child has become “a crocked man,” a word suggesting something crooked, bent out of shape, and also someone worn out or drunk, reinforcing the failing liver and the dance-hall setting. The fall is drawn across two lines, “he crumples up like a dry leaf / On the dance floor,” so that the line break itself feels like a collapse downward. After that, the poem accelerates. “Ask the janitor for a shovel / Scoop up that dry corpse from the dance floor” are direct, almost bureaucratic commands, and the next lines become shorter and harder: “Do it quickly / Do it fast.” The only near-rhyme in the poem is “fast” and “last,” sealing the paradox: the removal must be quick, but the music must go on indefinitely.
The final line, “And last,” is the poem’s darkest gesture. It could be read as a celebration of endurance—the music outlives the individual body—but it feels more like denial. No one stops the music; no one mourns. The repeated “last” stretches the moment, as if the speaker wants the sound to cover over what has just happened. The title, “You There,” reinforces the coldness: it is a summons, the kind of call used to hail a stranger or a hired hand, not a name. The address turns the reader into a bystander who has been noticed and might be asked to help with the shovelling.
What makes “You There” significant is its unflinching compression. In only eleven lines it moves from physical decay to a social instruction about how communities handle death in places built for pleasure. It uses no rhyme scheme and no regular meter, but its short lines and jagged stanza breaks create their own music—a music that, like the one in the poem, keeps going after the body is gone.