Half of "Feb 3" seems to be shouting. Words like GRASS, OIL, CAT and CALENDAR are capitalised at irregular intervals, as if the objects of an ordinary day keep leaping out at the writer before he can arrange them into sense. The title promises a date, a small marker of private time, and the nine lines that follow test what that private time can actually hold.
The poem opens with two flat statements: grass on the pampa, oil in the crankcase. One brings wide open grassland to mind, the other the greasy inside of an engine, and they share a sentence and a grammar, as though the mind simply registers whatever is there. Then comes the cat, who "purrs under her FUR / as if the CALENDAR would NEVER cease." A purr is a sound made beneath a surface, and the cat lives as if time had no end. The speaker, aware of the calendar and of the date in his own title, does not share that comfort. The joke is gentle, but it sets up the poem's real subject, which is how a person stays afloat in time.
Next the poem turns to the self. "I have ACCESS / to the PERSONAL" sounds like office language, as though the inner life were a locked file. The poem then makes it physical: the personal is "the AIR I TAKE, through WHICH / my two ARMS WAVE." Breathing and gesturing become the way he reaches anything. The waving is ambiguous, since it could be a greeting, a signal or a flail. Beyond that comes distance: "Farther AWAY, FACES, armies of WORDS, / DIM fact and fancy." This line has no verb. The far world offers only a list, and "fact and fancy" are equally dim, so the speaker cannot sort the true from the invented.
Memory fares no better. "Bacon, an OLD june" is the strangest fragment. The lowercase "june" echoes the calendar and the title but shrinks the month to something unimportant. "Bacon" could be a name or a breakfast food, and the poem does not say. That seems to be the point, because memory hands over scraps without labels. The next line says so outright: "MEMORY DISQUALIFIES itself," like a witness thrown out of court or an athlete removed from a race. Yet the following sentence begins with "Though," as if the argument were not quite finished, and admits that memory "may EMERGE / as a DROP of longing on my TONGUE." It returns as a taste or an ache rather than as information. The tongue also prepares for the last line, where speech arrives.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The long lines stumble forward in clumps of stress, such as "DIM fact and fancy," and the capitals work like beats struck by a hand on a table. The syntax is just as loose, mixing full statements with fragments that have no verbs. If you read only the capitalised words, you get a kind of telegram, and it ends on "LIVING AXIS," "ABLE," "SPEAK," "DYING." The poem's own emphasis points to its destination.
The final sentence is the calmest in the poem: "From this / LIVING AXIS, I am ABLE to SPEAK without DYING." An axis is the line around which something turns, so the speaker's body becomes the fixed point from which the scattered material (grass, engine oil, cat, faces, doubtful memories) can be addressed. The phrase "without dying" is double-edged. It might mean that speaking does not cost him his life, or that what he says will not go dead on the page the way a recorded memory can. The poem does not choose between these readings.
Perelman is generally grouped with the Language poets, who treat words as material to be looked at rather than as clear windows onto the world. This poem fits that approach: the capitals, the jolting grammar and the verbless fragments keep pulling attention to the words themselves. What makes it more than an experiment is the feeling underneath. Behind the jumble is a quiet claim that the present, breathing body is the one reliable place to speak from, and that speaking from it is a small victory over time.