Most of us would say that abstraction and plainness pull in opposite directions. Theodore Enslin's untitled poem, marked only by three asterisks, quietly turns that assumption over: "I think I go into abstraction / when the form is plain." The simpler and less decorated the thing in front of him, the further his mind seems to drift. It is a small paradox, and the whole poem grows out of it.
The word "abstraction" is worth pausing on. It comes from a Latin verb meaning to draw away, and in everyday English it also describes being lost in thought. So the speaker may not be leaving the physical world for a world of ideas. He may simply be absorbed, pulled out of himself by what he sees. The hedge "I think" matters as well. He announces no theory. He reports a habit of his own mind and admits he is not entirely sure of it, and that modesty sets the tone for everything after.
The second stanza gives his examples: "when the flower is to flower / and wood makes wood." Both describe things being exactly what they are. In the first, "flower" is a noun and then a verb, so the line says a flower's purpose is simply to do its flowering. The second is a loop: wood makes wood, and the sentence ends where it began. Nothing is explained or added, because there is no gap between the thing and what it does. The language matches this. Nearly every word is short and ordinary, and the repeated "when" gives the lines a patient, accumulating rhythm, as if the speaker were setting stones side by side.
The third stanza changes the grammar of the poem. So far things have happened on their own, and now the speaker is acted upon: "I am joined to a walk / or aimlessly / tuned to the sting / of a saw's thrust." He does not say he goes for a walk. He is joined to it, as though the walk were something he falls into. The word "aimlessly" sits alone on its line, and the break lets it work two ways. It can look back to the walk or ahead to the tuning. That ambiguity is a small enactment of drifting, since the line itself doesn't know where it is heading.
"Tuned" is the poem's one strong metaphor, and it turns the speaker into an instrument set to a pitch by something outside him. The pitch is surprising: "the sting / of a saw's thrust." The sounds do real work here. The hissing s of "sting," "saw's," and "thrust," and the hard t that ends it, seem to catch the push and bite of a blade. "Sting" is a sharp, almost uncomfortable word, yet he is attuned to it rather than repelled. The saw also loops back to the wood of the previous stanza. A saw is how wood stops simply making wood and becomes something shaped by people, so the ending lets human work enter the scene without spoiling it. The saw's sound becomes one more plain form to listen to.
The poem uses no rhyme and no punctuation, and the only capital letter is the pronoun "I." The stanzas run two lines, two lines, then four, and the lines are short and unevenly weighted. Without full stops, the thought slides from the opening claim through the flower and wood and into the walk, and it never closes. The saw's thrust is left hanging, which suits a poem about attention that does not finish.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it does what it describes. A poem about plain form is itself plain, with almost nothing decorative in it, and that bareness leaves the reader room to drift in the same way. It also offers a gentle correction to the idea that abstract thinking requires abstract subjects. Here the mind goes furthest when it is looking at a flower, a piece of wood, or a saw at work. Nothing in the text ties it to a particular place or occasion, and that fits, since the experience it describes could belong to anyone who has ever stared at something ordinary and felt their thoughts begin to lift away.