Read quickly, Larry Eigner's untitled poem looks like a few unconnected glimpses: lights at night, a bulldozer, a car, someone hauling planks. Read slowly, which the poem practically forces you to do, those glimpses become an argument about speed. On one side is human traffic and building, which "hauls fast / or it's haphazard." On the other is the earth, "a process / slow like stars / burn / a good while."
The opening is made of words that won't sit still. In "nights the / spectrum of / goods / lights / hauls fast," is "lights" a noun or a verb? Judging by the imagery, we may be watching freight move along a road after dark, but the poem never says so. "Spectrum" works twice: it suggests the colours of lights, and also the sheer range of things people make and move. "Goods" returns a few lines later inside "a good while," so that what we value and how long something takes share a word. The poem doesn't explain the echo, and it doesn't need to.
The line "or it's haphazard" is the most speech-like in the poem, almost a shrug. The speaker admits that the whole bustle of trade might be order or might be chaos. There is no capital letter and no full stop anywhere, and the only punctuation is the apostrophe in "it's." The reader has to assemble the grammar, with the line breaks standing in for commas.
The middle section slows right down. "Burn" sits alone on its line, and the white space after it stretches the moment the way a star stretches time. "A good while" is a wonderfully casual phrase for such an enormous span. Then the rhythm snaps. "Bulldoze / clear / floors" gives three one-word lines with hard, percussive consonants. The words also pivot as you read. "Bulldoze clear" can be an instruction or a description. "Clear floors" can be the cleaned surfaces of a future building. "Floors some of the land to the wind" turns "floors" into a verb meaning to knock flat, leaving the land exposed. The bulldozer finishes in an afternoon what the earth took ages to make. The phrase "some of the land" is oddly restrained, though. The poem observes, and it doesn't protest.
The second stanza shrinks the scale. "A car / on its shadow passes / far out" is a sharp piece of seeing, with the car riding over its own dark double. The sound does quiet work here, because "car" and "far" rhyme, and both lean on the "stars" of the earlier stanza. A passing vehicle ends up in the same sonic neighbourhood as the distant suns. The only other clear rhyme, "nights" and "lights," comes at the very start, and neither rhyme is stressed or forced. Otherwise the poem has no regular metre. Its lines run from one word to four, and the rhythm comes from breath and pause.
"A lot" is another hinge. It might mean "a great deal," or it might be a parking lot or a plot of land, which would fit the building imagery. Then comes the poem's only "you": "you carry boards across bends." After stars and machines, the poem ends on a person and a physical task. Boards are building material, and bends suggest curves in a road or path. I read this as a third pace, neither cosmic nor mechanical, the speed of a body working. That is an inference, since the poem doesn't say so, and it stops rather than concludes.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks the page to do. Eigner doesn't state an opinion about progress and nature. He lets slow time, fast cargo, and human labour sit next to one another and trusts the reader to feel the friction. The grammar stays slippery in the same way the relationship between those forces does, because "floors" and "lights" cannot be pinned to one meaning. Short lines make every word carry weight, and the poem teaches you to read at the speed of its subject, one look and one breath at a time.