A foot looks at a hand and does not like what it sees. That is the whole scene of Dave Bonta's four-line poem, and it is stranger than it sounds. Foot and hand belong to the same body, the "my" of the first line owns them both, and yet the foot has opinions of its own. It "came to see" the hand in a certain light, a phrase that suggests a slow souring of attitude rather than a sudden quarrel. The speaker becomes a bystander to his own anatomy, and the poem's central idea is this estrangement: a self that has stopped feeling like one thing and turned into a committee of parts who judge each other.
The title, "Extreme position," works on several levels. Hands and feet are the body's extremities, the two ends of its reach. An extreme position is also a hard-line opinion, which is exactly what the foot holds. And it is a physical posture, one the poem seems to stage without naming. The first and third lines end on "hand" and "stand," the poem's only full rhyme, and put together those words make a handstand: the hand taking over the foot's job. It is tempting to read line three that way. The "gone member" is "thinking how to stand," as if the hand were practising a role that doesn't belong to it. That would explain the foot's contempt.
The vocabulary shows the foot's attitude. Line one is made entirely of one-syllable words, plain and bodily: *my foot came to see my hand*. Then line two brings in the long, formal "impertinent." It is a word with two meanings. Today it means cheeky, but its older sense is "not pertaining," irrelevant. The hand is both rude and beside the point. It is also a word from the language of manners, the way a prim employer might talk about a servant who speaks out of turn. The foot is the lowest of the members, so there is a quiet comedy in hearing it speak like an offended aristocrat. Calling the hand an "echo" adds to the insult. An echo is a late, fainter copy of the original, and the hand and foot do resemble each other, with their five digits and their jobs at the ends of the limbs. The foot treats that resemblance as mimicry.
Notice too that the poem makes you wait for an echo it never supplies. "Echo" ends line two with nothing to answer it, and "went" ends line four with no rhyme either. The one echo the poem allows is "hand/stand," so the sound pattern quietly sides with the hand it is mocking.
"Member" is another doubled word. It is an old term for a limb, but it also means someone who belongs to a group, so a "gone member" sounds like someone struck off a list, and perhaps like a limb that is missing. The poem doesn't say which, and the unsettled meaning adds to the chill.
The last line is the strangest: "a thing on whom no being went." Grammar hesitates here. A "thing" should be called "which," but the poem says "whom," a word kept for persons, as though it can't decide whether the hand is an object or someone. Then there is the verb. Beings don't usually "go" on things. The phrasing suggests a tenant moving into a house, with the hand an empty room where nobody has taken up residence. "Being" is also the poem's biggest, most abstract word, and it arrives just when the foot delivers its harshest verdict: the hand is hollow, a body part with nobody in it. Rhythmically the line is the steadiest in the poem, four firm beats (*a THING on WHOM no BE-ing WENT*), and it stops on the hard "t" of "went." After the loosening of line three, the verdict has a flat finality.
One more thought, offered as a reading and not a fact: hands are the part of us that usually does the writing. If we picture that, the poem becomes a little ironic, a hand-made verdict on the hand's emptiness.
What makes the poem worth remembering is how much it does in so little space. In one sentence it turns a joke about bodily rivalry into a question about where a self actually lives. If a foot can stop recognising a hand, how sure are we that "my" body is a single thing at all?