Judson Crews builds this short poem around one small, bleak image: a fence post that has been thrown away and left to bake in the sun. Once useful, it is now "rejected of earth," and ants have moved into its splintered insides. The language is blunt and physical. Words like "shattered bowels" and "gutted" make the post feel less like wood and more like a wounded body.
The poem opens and closes with the abstract words "denial" and "affirmations," and the spider's web ties them to the scene. The web is "erratic," a flimsy attempt at order, and it is "gutted by affirmations," as if saying yes to life keeps tearing apart whatever denial tries to build. The speaker never states a feeling outright, but the title, "Some Aching," suggests a quiet, persistent pain. The mood is stark and unsentimental, with a sense of things being worn down and picked apart, yet still strangely alive, since the ants and the spider carry on in the ruin.