A sunny park, a monkey hanging from an old tree, and a confession that nobody quite knows how to answer. That is the situation in Margaret Randall's "Two Who Don't Know They Are Joined in This Poem." The speaker goes looking for warmth, "where it was warm and could be warm / inside too," and meets someone whose face is "the same and not." What follows is a man's account of his body and his treatment. He was born with crooked legs and slept in braces, he lives with "no climax and no climax," and he remembers shock treatments. The speaker listens and asks the question the poem keeps circling: who is to blame?
The poem's central idea is that blame does not stay in one place. The speaker's thoughts widen in a chain: "the blame of your parents / which is the blame of society / which is the blame of us all, of me." Each "which is" pushes responsibility outward until it lands on the speaker herself. Then comes a counter-voice, a friend's letter quoting the I Ching: "No Blame." The letter offers peace, but the poem doesn't simply accept it. The speaker only "thought of the no-blame," and the question about the shock treatments, "Who / was to blame," is left hanging, with no answer. The ending suggests that blame can't be dissolved, only shared, "to be held in our hands / one by one."
The form helps make this argument. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular rhythm. Lines run long and then stop short ("You told me" sits alone), as if the speaker were feeling for the right pace. The punctuation is loose. "Thismorning" is jammed into one word, and the friend's letter uses an ampersand, which gives it the hurry of a real note. Spoken confession and thought blur together. The only quotation marks belong to the written letter, while the man's words arrive unmarked. "And you said" is followed by no quoted speech at all, only the line "I still cry when I think of the shock treatments," which seems to be his voice sliding into the poem. His pain isn't fenced off from the speaker's page. That fits the title, since the two people really are joined, and the poem says how: "the same pain / that makes us love one another / even before we know each other here."
Repetition carries much of the feeling. "You told me" appears twice, as if the speaker were stalling before the hard part. "And no climax and no climax" stutters, and then the man hunts for a word: "what do you call it / you said." The clinical term "orgasm" arrives as the stanza's last, flat word. The poem treats his sexual difficulty as plain fact, without embarrassment or sensationalism.
The imagery sets sunlit calm against private suffering. The ballplayers are "gaunt," the women walk "slowly," and the monkey simply hangs there, an ordinary scene with an undertone of hunger and weariness. The speaker sits "on the warm grass" while thinking about electric shock, so warmth and pain occupy the same moment.
The last stanza is the strangest and best. The man's wristwatch is hung "on that woman's shoulder / coming out of the public john." Judging by the image, it is a puzzling act, perhaps a gesture of disorientation, or of giving away time. The next line follows it: "Your pain points in new directions." "Points" works like the hands of a watch, and the poem's final image, blame "held in our hands," seems to pick up that pun. Even if the connection is only suggested, the closing lines leave the reader with something physical to hold.
The poem is significant because it won't take the easy comfort. "No Blame" sounds wise, but the poem tests it against a real person's history and finds it incomplete. It also treats private suffering, such as a body, a family, or a hospital, as tied to "society" and "us all," without lecturing. The speaker doesn't solve anything. She stays beside the man in the sun, and that unresolved closeness is what the poem offers.