Barely two dozen words, and the poem still manages to contain a job, a building, a soul in trouble and a joke. Much of the work is done by the title. A contractor is someone hired to build, a tradesman with a brief and a deadline. The word also hides *contract*, and in hell that is hard to hear innocently, since it recalls the old bargains made with the devil. Before the first line begins, the speaker is already both a craftsman and, possibly, a signatory.
The first sentence turns on a small, strange loop: "I made a jade city for the heart / to have a heart in." The word "heart" appears twice, and the two hearts are not quite the same. The first is the thing being housed, the feeling self. The second is more like a centre, a core, the way we speak of the heart of a city. So the city is built to hold a heart, and the heart is meant to find its own heart inside it. The nesting suggests a heart that has lost its middle and needs scaffolding to recover one. The material matters too. Jade is beautiful, polished and hard, and it is not warm. A soft organ in a stone city sounds protected and slightly imprisoned at once. The sound adds to this: "made" and "jade" chime inside the opening line, so the making seems to produce its own material. The line break after "heart" leaves the little word "in" dangling at the end of the stanza, as if the poem had closed a door behind it.
The second sentence changes the mood. "I hope to be possessed by evil" is startling because "hope" is the wrong verb. We fear possession, and the speaker files it under ambition. Then comes the swerve, "but very civilly," which turns a dark wish into a matter of etiquette. The comedy lies in the word "very," which puts an intensifier on good manners as though evil were a guest to be received properly. There is also a quiet link back to the first stanza. "Civilly" and "city" come from the same Latin family, and the English words still sound related. The jade city and the polite manner turn out to be the same project, which is civilization as a way of keeping feeling presentable. "Possessed" also has a builder's ring, since to possess is to own property, and that keeps the contractor's vocabulary running under the supernatural one.
Formally the poem is spare. It has no rhyme, though "made" and "jade" echo in the opening line, and it uses two couplets in free verse. Each couplet pairs a longer line with a shorter one, roughly eight syllables and then five, then nine and six, so each stanza begins with a confident statement and ends on a trailing afterthought. The poem has no punctuation at all, not even a final full stop. That fits the deadpan voice, which sounds like a man mentioning something in passing, and it leaves "civilly" hanging with a faint smile. The two stanzas also differ in tense. The first reports a finished act ("I made") and the second voices a wish ("I hope"). The building is done, and what the speaker wants now is for something to enter it.
The central idea seems to be that the very structures we build to house and protect feeling can also leave us hungry for its violence. The speaker has constructed an orderly, glittering place for the heart, and what he wants next is to be overwhelmed, though only on conditions. The poem does not say whether this is wit, self-mockery or real longing, and the doubt is the point. Is the jade city a refuge, a cell, or hell's own show home? Is the polite request a clever way of staying in control, or a sign that the speaker cannot let go even in his worst wishes?
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. The title carries the plot, one repeated word carries the emotional puzzle, and one adverb carries the tone, all in two sentences. It is dark, funny and unsettling, and it leaves the reader to decide what the jade city is for.