A phrase from a heartbreak song becomes a reminder of death in six short lines. The title, "Your cheatin' heart," is the same as that of a well-known Hank Williams song, and the poem seems to lean on that echo. It borrows the song's picture of betrayal and love gone wrong, then moves the wrongdoing somewhere much larger. The unfaithful lover is no longer one person. It is all of us: "what cheating rogues we are."
The second line explains why. We are "already married to time." The word "already" matters. Nobody chose this marriage, and it was in force before any of us could say yes. Every other loyalty, whether to a person, a plan or a promise, is therefore a kind of infidelity. We spend our hours as if they were ours to give away, but we belong to someone else. The word "rogues" gives the confession a rueful, almost affectionate tone. These are mischievous cheats, not villains, and that is part of the poem's bitter charm. We behave like people who think we can get away with it.
Then comes the central image: "hard heart like a contract / none of us understood but the undertaker." The comparison is odd, and its oddness repays attention. A contract is cold, binding and full of small print, and the heart here is made of the same stuff. "Contract" also works as a verb, since muscles and hearts contract, and the word hints at shrinking and tightening as well as at legal obligation. The heart is both the organ that will eventually stop and the document that guarantees it will. "Hard" can mean unfeeling, but it also means unyielding, like terms that cannot be renegotiated.
The one reader who understands the terms is the undertaker, and the word is well chosen. An undertaker buries the dead, but the word also contains "undertaking," a promise or obligation taken on. Look at the sound as well. "Understood" and "undertaker" share their opening, so the two words seem to be linked. To understand the contract is to be an undertaker. Everyone else only signs.
The last stanza gives this figure a personality. He "would not be content / with fair words." "Fair" can mean pleasant and flattering, and it can mean just, so the line works in two ways. Apologies, charm and good intentions will not satisfy him, and neither will a fair bargain, because he does not bargain. He is the creditor who collects. The phrase also carries the voice of the song, where a wronged lover might be talked round with sweet speeches. Here the wronged party cannot be talked round at all. The poem's one moment of menace comes in the verb phrase "would not be content," which is phrased politely and is entirely final.
The form carries the same restraint. The poem has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so it reads as one long, quiet sentence broken into couplets. The first couplet is complete in itself and sounds like a wry remark. After that the syntax stretches. The line about the contract is the longest and heaviest, loaded with the stresses of "hard heart" and the awkward weight of "none of us understood," and it seems to drag the way fine print does. The couplet break after "undertaker" leaves the relative "who" hanging, so the reader has to cross the white space to find out what he does. When the poem ends, it simply stops, with no full stop and no consoling turn. Anything more comforting would have been the kind of fair words the undertaker refuses.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a familiar, almost comic phrase about romantic betrayal and shows that the phrase fits our whole situation. Its tone is wry, and the wryness makes the fear easier to bear. The poem does not argue that we will die. It lets us feel that we have signed something without reading it, and that someone else has read every clause.