Larry Eigner opens by shrinking the universe. "Once worlds were / small as battleships / or nine dozen ballfields" gives us two odd yardsticks, one built for war and one for play, both made by people and both measurable. The next line, "enough to be perfect," suggests that a world you can pace out is a world you can finish. Everything that follows describes that completeness going sour. The poem has no title, only asterisks, so the parenthetical "(as you go into Seir or Ives)" is the first thing we meet. Seir is a biblical place-name, but the poem explains neither name. Judging by the text, the line works like a signpost at a threshold: you step into somewhere, and the thinking begins.
"But a number of things / now go wrong" is deliberately flat. "A number of things" is vague and deflating, the way someone talks when the trouble is too big to list. The worlds are now "merged," with a "mysterious expectation" hanging over them and "no god-like power / that we can conceive." The word "conceive" matters here. The limit is imagination as much as belief. We can't even picture something large enough to hold all this together.
The syntax stumbles in the middle of the poem. "We see in front ahead / and why not be there" doubles itself, "in front" and "ahead," as if the speaker were leaning forward faster than the grammar can follow. The question is casual, almost a shrug, yet it captures a restless modern urge: if we can see it, why not go? Then comes the joke of "math is quite the bag / of a half nonillion tricks." A nonillion is a number with thirty zeros in the American system, and halving it is a comic piece of false precision. Mathematics, usually a symbol of certainty, becomes a conjurer's bag. The chatty phrase "quite the bag" punctures any grandeur.
The poem then turns to history through two names. "So Goya went mad in the end something like / Swift" has no punctuation, and the line break leaves "Swift" hanging, as the sentence itself seems to trail off. "Something like" admits that this is half-remembered lore rather than settled fact. One reading is that people who look hardest at a world beyond their measure pay for it. The next phrase, "how things pass / go on," holds two meanings at once. Things pass away, and things pass by and continue.
The last stanzas turn to eyes and maps. "One colored eye / one black and white" splits vision in two, perhaps the vivid present against history flattened like an old photograph. That is an inference, but the poem backs it up with "history's a map / no time," which turns time into space and also says there is "no time" to spare. Then come "black places" and "nothing stopped...," where the ellipsis refuses to close the thought. The final line, "dead forgotten flags," has no full stop. It echoes the opening. The battleships have become relics, and the flags are what remain of the causes they served.
The form carries the argument. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation apart from that last ellipsis, and capitals appear only on the names Goya and Swift. Lines run from two to five words, and the stanza breaks work like breaths or lapses of attention. The register lurches between the abstract ("mysterious expectation") and the slangy ("quite the bag"), so the voice sounds like a mind thinking aloud rather than a speaker delivering a verdict. Sound adds weight at the close. The three heavy words of "dead forgotten flags" land almost like three footsteps, with the d and f sounds giving them a muffled finality.
The poem is worth reading because it earns its meaning through echoes and gaps instead of explanation. "Perfect" is answered by "black places," "battleships" by "flags," and "colored" by "black and white." Readers must connect these themselves, and the effort mirrors the poem's subject, the strain of making sense of a world too large to hold. It never solves that problem, and it ends by leaving us with what is left.