Leaning is a strange thing to build a love poem around. It is not an embrace or a kiss but the moment before contact, a body tilted toward another and not yet held. Lloyd Addison makes that unfinished motion the engine of "This Because: A Countless Accounting." The poem's central insight is that desire is a risk: you can only lean if someone is there to take your weight.
The title promises a ledger, and the poem behaves like one. "I lean" opens section after section ("I lean to you," "I lean:", "I lean / out of the lawn sky," "I lean, now"), and each time the speaker adds another reason, another "this because." The reasons never come out tidy. The stanzas are uneven and the dashes keep interrupting, so the tally feels as "countless" as the title says, always spilling past its own columns.
Sound carries much of the meaning. The word "lean" breeds a whole family of l-words: "leanest," "lion," "allured," "align," "alone," "living," "lying." In the lines "lion, but unbeleaguered of lions, / allured to visit, to align — / alone, no lion alone," the speaker moves from pride to loneliness almost by sound alone. A lion suggests strength, yet the sound keeps drifting to "alone," and "living, lying alone" may carry a second sense of lying down, or even of untruth. Elsewhere, "first" and "thirst" chime together in the mirage passage, but the poem mostly avoids regular rhyme. Its music is made of echo and alliteration rather than pattern.
The grammar is one of its cleverest touches. The speaker longs for "the non-transitive balance, / the coupling substantive." In grammar, "lean" is itself an intransitive verb. It cannot act directly on an object and needs a "to" or "toward" to reach anyone. One way to read the phrase is that this love does not want to seize or possess, only to incline. "Substantive" can mean a noun, a thing, and also something solid and real. The speaker wants this leaning to harden into a real couple, not stay a gesture in the air.
The imagery swings between landscape and city. The beloved is a "little hill of dreams / to sleep within" but also a "hydrant of hope / to spring afresh," an ordinary street object with water pressed up inside it, ready to burst. Then comes thirst: the speaker leans "into mirages of thirst / to be first at your mouth." The word "mirages" admits that the thing reached for might not be there.
Addison also bends words until they carry two meanings. "Tomorrow is a weight-outdoorway time" puts "weight" where we expect "wait," so the future is both a burden and a delay, with the doorknob already turning. The speaker escapes a "roomless / no roommate mold of breath," a stale, mouldy air of living alone, toward "otherwide rooms windowfilled." The odd "otherwide" seems to blend "otherwise" and "wide." Then "windless soul" echoes "window," as if the soul had all the openings but no moving air.
The ending changes the poem's sound and posture. The consonants harden into "barbs of balustrades, / of barricades of isolation," and independence is diagnosed as illness, "feverish autonomy." After all that confident repetition of "I lean," the voice breaks into the stuttered, isolated plea "don't / don't lean away." It is the only negative command in the poem, and the only moment where the speaker asks for something instead of announcing it. Everything before it was the speaker's motion. The last lines admit that the balance depends entirely on the other person staying put.
That admission is what makes the poem worth reading closely. It takes a small, physical verb and shows how much exposure it holds: reaching, trusting, and fearing that the other will step aside. Its odd coinages and tangled syntax are not decoration. They enact the clumsiness of someone trying to say something both urgent and unsafe to say.