Eight words, two lines, and a whole scene: a woman whose legs are uneven, a collision, and an "early" we can't quite place. Anselm Hollo's untitled poem, marked only by three asterisks, says nothing about how the speaker feels. It simply sets down a physical detail and an event and lets them touch. Its central idea seems to be that the people who change us often arrive by accident, and that we remember them through some small imperfection rather than a full portrait.
The first line, "one leg shorter", has no verb, no capital letter and no full stop. It could be a caption attached to "she", or a thought that surfaces before the sentence has started. Either way it works like a close-up: the speaker's memory skips the face, the clothes and the setting and goes straight to the one irregular fact. The wording is odd, too. It says "one leg", not "her leg", which sounds almost clinical, like a measurement. And "shorter" is a comparison with the missing half left out. Shorter than what? Than the other leg, obviously, but the line never says so. The imbalance is built into the grammar.
The second line, "she walked into me early", turns on a flexible idiom. To walk into someone is to bump them, and the verb "walked" is plain, even breezy. No one lurches or stumbles. Yet the poem lets us connect the lines: an uneven stride, a collision. It never writes "because", and it doesn't need to, since putting the two lines side by side does the explaining. Then there is "into me". She doesn't walk into a doorway or a crowd but into the speaker, and the preposition suggests entering as much as colliding. A bump on the pavement starts to sound like something that got inside.
Then comes the last word, "early", which is the most open in the poem. She could have arrived before she was expected, or met the speaker early in the day, early in his life, or early in some longer story. The poem won't choose, and because "early" sits at the end, it keeps echoing after the line stops. It also quietly matches "shorter". A leg is cut short in length, and the meeting happens short of its proper time. Space and time are both measured as slightly less than they should be, and the poem seems to find meaning in that shortfall.
The sound and shape of the lines add to this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The first line has four syllables and the second has seven, so the poem is itself lopsided, with one line shorter than the other, like the leg it describes. The stresses fall heavily on "leg" and "short" in the first line, then the second goes "she WALKED INto me EARly", with a little stumble in the middle where the stress seems to trip over "into". Both lines end on unstressed syllables, "-er" and "-ly", so neither lands firmly. They trail off instead of closing. The soft *sh* of "she" and "shorter" links the lines, and so does the *l* running through "leg", "walked" and "early". With no punctuation anywhere, nothing marks an ending, and the encounter feels unfinished, as if the collision were still happening.
The title, a row of asterisks, adds to that impression. It is a conventional way of marking an untitled piece, and here it makes the lines look like a fragment lifted from something longer, or a memory that surfaces without a label.
The poem is worth reading for how much it gets from so little. It trusts the reader to link the leg to the collision and the collision to something larger, and it never tells us whether the meeting was lucky or painful. It also turns a familiar idea, that meetings are accidents and that people stay with us through odd details, into something you feel in the rhythm. The lines themselves are uneven and a little off balance, and they carry us into a stranger's path before we expect it.