Five short lines, and already someone is being asked to lie. "Meet me in thin arms," the speaker begins, and the command arrives before any explanation. There is no greeting, no scene, no name for the person addressed. The title, "Rendezvous," promises a secret appointment of the kind lovers make, but what follows is stranger and sadder than a romantic invitation. The speaker doesn't ask for honesty. They ask for a pretext: "say it is only to sell me a trick / or a ring in the nose."
Start with those "thin arms." The phrase can be read as the embrace of a slender person, but "meet me in" treats the arms as a place, something you stand inside. Judging by the wording, they could just as easily be bare branches, a thicket stripped of leaves. Either way, "thin" suggests scarcity. Whatever is on offer is meagre, and the speaker is prepared to take it anyway.
The next two lines make the bargain explicit. A "trick" can be a con, a conjurer's sleight of hand, or something more transactional. The "ring in the nose" is the sharpest image in the poem: the picture of an animal led around by a piece of metal through its most sensitive part. The speaker is inviting the other person to treat them as a mark, a creature to be led. The small word "only" matters here. "Say it is *only* to sell me a trick" tries to make the meeting safe by naming the worst motive in advance. If I name the lie myself, the speaker seems to reason, I can't really be deceived. It is pride and loneliness at once.
Then the poem turns on its last two lines: "I know how true / rain would be." Up to this point the vocabulary has belonged to the marketplace, with selling, tricks and rings. Suddenly the speaker reaches for something that can't be sold. The line break lets "I know how true" stand briefly on its own, a flat claim of knowledge, and it quietly contradicts the speaker's apparent willingness to be fooled. The command "say" belongs to pretending, and "know" belongs to the one who sees through it. The speaker is no innocent. They can tell a counterfeit from the real thing, and they are asking for the counterfeit regardless.
The conditional "would be" is where the ache lives. Rain is not falling; it is only imagined. The poem never mentions drought, but the thin arms and the hunger for something "true" point that way. Rain is a good emblem of the real because it can't run a con. It falls or it doesn't, and it arrives without a sales pitch. The echo of sounds in "true rain," with the r hiding inside both words, makes the two seem to belong together, as if truth were simply what rain is.
The form supports all this without calling attention to itself. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the lines have a shape. Counting syllables gives 5, 9, 6, 4, 3. The poem swells in the long second line, where the repeated s sounds of "say it is only to sell me" might remind us of a salesman's patter, and then it tapers away. By the end the speaker's bravado has run out. The diction tightens too. Apart from "only" and the title, every word in the poem has one syllable. "Rendezvous" is the one fancy, borrowed word, a bit of French gloss on a very plain need, and it may even be the first small trick the poem plays on us.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves in the gap between its two sentences. We never learn who the "you" is, why the speaker is so willing to be used, or whether the meeting happens. We are left with a tension most people will recognise: wanting something real so badly that you'll accept a fake, while knowing exactly what you're missing. Five lines are enough to hold desire, self-protection and a little dignity, and the last image, plain and unsold, is the one that stays.