Nine lines, hardly a dozen words that aren't one syllable, and still "Two Times" leaves a reader unsure what is actually going on. That uncertainty is the point. Robert Creeley, known for very short lines and for letting line breaks do much of the work, gives us two scenes in which something is about to tip one way or the other, and he never tells us what the something is.
The first section begins with a complaint about time: "It takes so long to look down." The act of looking down should be quick, but the speaker stretches it out, as if lowering the eyes means facing something. The next lines explain the delay by going back to "the first time," when the speaker expected that "it" would "then and there either / shoot up or else drop off." The pronoun "it" has no clear referent. It could be a body, a feeling, a wound, a plant, or a hope. Because the poem never names it, any of these can be read in. The two verbs are built as opposites: "shoot up" against "drop off," rising against falling, with "down" in the first line already pulling the other way. Each phrasal verb also carries more than one meaning. "Shoot up" can mean grow suddenly, and "drop off" can mean fall away, fall asleep, or fade. The words are plain, but they keep several readings open.
The rhythm of this section is a series of small hesitations. The comma after "down" is the only internal punctuation in the poem. Elsewhere the line endings do the pausing. "Thinking it" ends the second line with the subject hanging, so we wait for what "it" will do. The third line ends on "either," which promises a choice and makes us wait a whole line for the second option. "Then and there" suggests immediacy, yet the first line has just said everything takes "so long." The poem sets a sudden outcome against a drawn-out wait and lets them pull on each other.
The second section changes the picture completely: "One hand on / the trigger one / hand on the hand." Now there is a gun, or at least the word "trigger," and it echoes the "shoot" of the first section. The sentence has no verb, so nothing moves, and the image stays frozen. The line breaks make the reading harder. "One hand on" breaks off at a preposition, with nothing yet for the hand to rest on. The second line ends "the trigger one," so for a moment "one" seems to attach to "trigger," and only the next line corrects it: "one / hand on the hand." There is no comma, so the reader has to work out where one thought ends and the next begins. The word "hand" appears three times in three lines, and the repetition makes the grip feel tight and fixed.
The final phrase, "the hand," is the most puzzling. Whose hand is it? One reading is that someone is steadying their own shaking hand. Another is that one person is guiding or restraining someone else's. The poem doesn't say, and I'd argue the ambiguity is deliberate. In one version the hand on the hand is control, in another it is help, and in a third it is force. The same posture could be care or danger.
The title ties the two sections together. "Two Times" can mean two occasions, and the phrase "the first time" in the opening section makes the second part feel like a later return, where looking has turned into holding and waiting has turned into the edge of action. That is an inference from the text, but it fits how the poem is built. "Times" may also hint at doubling in general: two sections, two possible outcomes, two hands.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it uses. There is no rhyme and no explanation, and the images are few and plain. Tension comes from word order and line endings, and the reader supplies the rest, so the poem ends up being about the moment before a decision, when everything is still possible and nothing has happened.