Judson Crews gives us a fence post, some ants and a spider, then asks us to watch an argument play out among them. The poem opens in pure abstraction ("Denial / to mitigate the / affirmations") and then, as if embarrassed by its own vagueness, drops into a scene you can almost smell: a "discarded / fence post" baking in the sun. Everything after the first stanza tests that opening idea against something real.
"Mitigate" means to lessen or soften, so denial is cast as a painkiller, a way of dulling the force of every yes. But whose denial is it? The poem has no "I" and no named sufferer. The title, "Some Aching," shrugs with its casual "some," and because the ache never settles in a person, it seems to seep into the objects. The post is "sun beaten," a phrase that sounds like punishment, as if the wood had been flogged by the weather.
The middle stanzas turn on a deliberate clash of registers. "Mitigate" is a clinical, Latinate word. "Piss ants" and "bowels" are blunt and bodily. The line break after "Rejected / of earth" leaves "piss ants" hanging, so the rejection seems to fall on the ants as much as on the post. The old-fashioned "rejected of" adds a faintly biblical weight, which sits oddly beside such a crude insect name. Then comes the quiet surprise. The ants "nest," a word of shelter, inside the post's "shattered / bowels." Calling the wood's insides "bowels" makes the post a kind of corpse, and the ants a small, unglamorous form of life moving into what has been thrown away. This is the first affirmation in the poem, and it is not a speech or a gesture but simply something living in a dead thing.
The spider supplies the poem's central image. Its web is "stitched," a verb from sewing and wound-closing, and it is "erratic," not the tidy geometry we expect of a web. Denial, then, is handmade and improvised, patched together from whatever is to hand. The capital on "Web" in the middle of the line is a small oddity, since nothing else mid-line is capitalised, and it makes the word stand up like a title. Then the poem turns on its last two lines: "gutted / by affirmations." "Gutted" works two ways. It can mean a fish cleaned out, or a building burnt hollow. Either way, it echoes "bowels" from three stanzas earlier, so the web is treated like the post, as something with an inside that can be torn open. The poem's opening promise is also reversed. At the start, denial was supposed to soften the affirmations. By the end the affirmations have emptied out the denial.
Formally, Crews works with very little. There is no rhyme and no punctuation at all, and the lines are short, mostly two to four syllables, so the poem moves in small, halting steps. The stanzas run three, three, three, three and then six lines, and the longer final stanza feels as though the poem needs extra room to undo the web. "Affirmations" is the longest word in the poem and ends both the first stanza and the last, which frames the poem and shows how far the idea has travelled in between. The sound is hard and hissing, with s and t sounds running through "discarded," "post," "piss," "shattered," "spider" and "stitched." It is the sound of dry wood and small scratching legs.
The poem is worth reading because it makes a psychological point without any psychology. It never says what is being denied, and it does not announce a victory for the truth. It suggests that denial is flimsy and fussy work, a spider's patchwork, and that what undoes it is the ordinary, stubborn business of things going on, such as ants making a home in a rotten post. The final image is also ambiguous. We cannot be sure whether "affirmations" are healing forces or simply the facts of decay and survival that no web can hold. That uncertainty keeps the poem aching long after the last line.