Most of the poem is a description, and a rather unflattering one: "Thick-thighed, big-bellied, / Heavy buttocked, hairy, / Squat." The speaker looks at a man the way a stranger might look at someone on the street, noticing the body and little else. The final stanza overturns that distance. The man being described says, "I reach out to you, / I'm the man you just passed." The title now sounds like an accusation. The reader is the one who walked by, and the poem is the attempt at speech that the encounter never allowed.
What gives the portrait its weight is how quickly the man stops being one individual. His "head set directly into chest" and his "grunting out of a cave" suggest a prehistoric figure. Then the lines move through history in a rush: "Ice-driven into shelter," "Planting the alluvial plains," "a book of myths / And laws, a flood, / A kingdom, a flood." The repeated flood suggests that civilisation keeps being built and washed away. The poem never names a period or place, and that vagueness is the point. The man is a working man, any man, with the whole human story packed into his body.
Two phrases form a refrain: "No clear origin, / No obvious direction." They open the poem and return in the second and third stanzas, so the man seems to circle back to the same spot. His life is also described as "bound up / And freed and bound again." The poem's structure follows this pattern, since the third stanza largely replays the second with small changes. "Walking" and "arms uncomfortable / At his sides" recur, as if the man cannot get out of the loop.
The poem uses no rhyme and no regular metre. It relies on short lines, heavy enjambment, and repetition. The blunt, thudding sounds of "Thick-thighed, big-bellied" make the body feel solid and earthbound. Then single words stand alone as sentences: "Talking." "Eating. Eating well." These fragments make life seem reduced to basic functions. Yet even eating is anxious, done "with his eyes / Over his shoulder." Appetite and fear run together.
The cleverest effect comes from a line break. "Feet planted in fear, planting" ends one stanza, and "Nothing, facing murder" begins the next. In the earlier stanza "planting" had meant farming the alluvial plains, a hopeful image of settling and growing. Here the word turns into a pun. The feet are rooted in fear, and the thing being planted is nothing. The white space between the stanzas holds the failure open for a moment before the word arrives. The phrase then repeats, and the second time it ends not with a stanza break but with a bleak flat statement: "In a country / Of murderers." The poem does not say which country or why, so the accusation is left to spread.
Contradiction runs through the man's desires too. He looks "Skyward, looking earthward, / Averting eyes, looking deeply / Into eyes." He wants contact and is afraid of it. He is a "lover / Of women, lover / Of children, deserter / Of both," so even his love is unreliable. He is "Desirous / Of love" and "Desirous / Of knowledge," yet knows "Nothing of himself, or next / To nothing." The phrase "pride of his youth" sits oddly against the heavy, worn body described earlier, and it may suggest that this wandering, frightened figure is always at the start of his own story.
The ending is quiet and sad. Earlier the man had "Words in his mouth," but at the close the line is in the past tense: "There were words in my mouth." The moment has gone, the stranger has walked on, and the words stayed unsaid. The poem is both the man's reaching out and the reader's missed chance to answer.
That is why the poem is worth studying. It takes a figure we would normally ignore and gives him the whole of human history, its myths, floods, laws and fears. By switching from "he" to "I" at the last moment, it also makes the reader feel the cost of not looking.