Eighteen words, three stanzas, a whole planet: Barrett Watten's poem begins like a line copied from a geography textbook and ends like a question asked at a window. Between those two points, something shifts, and the poem never says what.
The first stanza sounds like information. "One third of the earth's surface / covered by land" is a rounded, schoolbook figure, and it has no verb, so it reads more like a caption or a note jotted in a margin than a sentence. The phrasing also turns things around. We usually say the earth is covered by water, so putting "land" in the covering role makes it a thin layer laid over the surface rather than the thing itself. The line break helps. "Surface" hangs at the end of the first line, and only then does the next line tell us what covers it. The two-thirds that goes unmentioned is the ocean, and it is present only as an absence.
The second stanza, "What goes and stays.", is a single line, and its grammar will not settle. It could be a noun phrase, a question that has lost its question mark, or a statement waiting for a verb. The two verbs pull against each other, since to go is to leave and to stay is to remain. The poem never says what is doing the going or the staying, or where. One natural reading is that the land stays while everything on it passes through. Another is that the line is about memory, about what we keep and what we lose. Even the commands "go" and "stay" are faintly audible, as if someone were talking to a dog. The poem gives no sign of choosing among these readings.
The last stanza brings in a person. "How does it look now." contains the poem's only word about seeing and its only word about time, and both are small: "look" and "now." Nothing tells us what "it" refers to. It might be the land, the earth, or the whole situation the first two stanzas sketched. Whoever asks the question is standing somewhere, in some present moment, looking. After the planetary scale of the opening, the poem narrows to one pair of eyes. The question also ends with a full stop instead of a question mark, so it does not rise the way a question should. It sounds flat and almost tired, as if the answer were already half known.
The sound of the poem supports this narrowing. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The rhythm comes from how heavy the stresses are: "One third" opens with two strong beats in a row, and "What goes and stays" and "How does it look now" are built entirely from one-syllable words, which makes them slow and even. The longer, more technical words, "surface" and "covered," belong to the first stanza, the one that sounds like science. After that the vocabulary gets plainer, almost childlike. The stanzas shrink from two lines to one to one, and the white space between them works like a pause for breath, or for thought. The title, three asterisks, adds to the effect. Asterisks conventionally mark a break or an omission, so the poem presents itself as a fragment taken from something larger, even though all we have is what is on the page.
What the poem is about, then, depends on how much the reader brings. Its central idea seems to be the gap between knowing a fact and knowing how something looks, between a statistic and a view. A number tells you how much land there is, but it cannot tell you what stays, what leaves, or what the place looks like today. A reader might hear an environmental worry in "how does it look now," or a more personal sense of change, but the text supplies neither. It only supplies the question.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It shows how little a poem needs to start working: a borrowed fact, two verbs, an unanswered question. The poem asks the reader to supply the missing pieces. Try reading it aloud three times, once as a lesson, once as a worry, once as a whisper, and notice how the same eighteen words change each time.