A piece of string fills with wind, grows flesh, says goodbye through a door, and then the poem drifts off to look at tall buildings and church music. Ted Greenwald's «String» doesn't tell a story, and it doesn't say what it means. What it offers is a chain of things changing state: string into body, sky into something heavy, music into something bodily. The central idea seems to be that the world, seen in a half-attentive mood, doesn't stay in its separate boxes. Objects, sounds and feelings leak into one another.
The opening shows how this works. The first six lines form one sentence with "String" as its subject, and the grammar is perfectly tidy even though the sense is not. The string is "Puffed by / Imaginary wind", which makes it sound like a sail or a balloon filled by something that isn't there. It is "Ribbed with notes", which suggests both a musical string and a ribbed fabric. Then comes the strangest simile: it "Takes on flesh like water". Flesh and water are both soft and yielding, and the comparison suggests something solid turning liquid and alive. By the sixth line the string talks: it "Says, 'See you later'". That ordinary farewell is startling coming from a piece of thread, and it is spoken "Through the window of the door", a phrase that is slightly impossible, since a door with a window in it is both a barrier and a transparent gap.
The middle of the poem turns on a pun. "Popular sentiments pull through / And survive the past" can be read as people recovering from an illness. It can also be read literally, as a thread being pulled through cloth. Either way, "See you later" is itself a popular sentiment, a worn phrase that has outlived countless uses. The poem seems to notice that clichés are tough, and that the string's goodbye is exactly the kind of thing that survives.
Then the scene widens. "Tall buildings / Make themselves comfortable / In the lump afternoon sky." The buildings are personified like people settling into an armchair, and "lump" is an unusual choice of adjective. It makes the sky sound thick and sluggish, like porridge or a heavy mood. That heaviness prepares for the ending, where "church music / Softly walks into the mucus." The last word is a small shock. "Music" and "mucus" are almost the same sound, with the letters rearranged and one vowel changed, so the poem seems to slide from one to the other. The line suggests a blocked, head-cold afternoon in which even sacred sound is swallowed up by something sticky and bodily. It also connects back to "flesh" at the start, so the poem ends in the same physical, fleshy territory where it began.
Sound holds the poem together where logic doesn't. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Instead there are echoes: the blunt vowels in "Puffed," "lump" and "mucus," and the repeated p's in "Popular sentiments pull through." Short lines such as "Tall buildings" and "String" land like single beats, while "Softly walks into the mucus" stretches out and ends the poem with a slow, soft fall. Punctuation is almost absent, apart from a comma and the quotation marks, so the images run on without pause. The poem has fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but nothing else about it follows that form.
The poem is worth reading because of what it asks of the reader. It gives no key, so each connection has to be made by the person reading: string to music, music to body, body to weather. The tone is playful, even a little grubby, and it undercuts any idea that poetry must be solemn. It also shows that a poem can work by texture and association, through how words sound and what they brush against, as much as by statement. The ending leaves a question open: is that final image funny, unpleasant, or oddly tender?