Most poems hope to be read in a quiet chair. This one imagines the least private reading conditions possible: a man standing at a urinal with nowhere to look but straight ahead. The title sets up the joke and the trap. The poem is posted where the reader's eyes are supposed to be fixed, so obeying the command and reading the poem become the same act.
That command arrives in the first line, "Eyes front, soldier," which is clipped like a barked order. The speaker sounds like a drill sergeant, and the men's room becomes a parade ground. The unwritten rule of the urinal, that you never glance sideways, is dressed up as military discipline. Then comes "The general looks hard / for signs / of deviation." The general is never identified, which makes him more menacing. He could be a boss, a father, or the social pressure every man has absorbed until it watches him from inside his own head. "Deviation" works doubly, as a soldier stepping out of line and as a deviation from sexual norms. The word also sits alone on its short line, like something caught out of formation.
The second stanza loosens the tone. "Don't show too much interest / even in this poem, / which is probably gay." The voice drops from command to sidelong confidence, and the poem turns on itself. It has outed itself, but with a shrug, hedged with "probably," as if even a poem's orientation were a matter of suspicion. The joke targets the paranoia the first stanza set up: in this world, a man who reads a poem with too much enthusiasm might be giving himself away. The flat, almost casual rhythm of "which is probably gay" makes the line funnier than a more emphatic delivery would.
Then the poem does something unexpected. "There were trees here once / where you stand relieving yourself / against a hollow trunk." The register changes from barracks comedy to quiet elegy. The reader is told that this tiled, regulated room sits on ground that used to be forest. The "hollow trunk" is ambiguous. Judging by the imagery, it could be a stump, the urinal or its pipe imagined as a tree, or simply the emptiness left where trees were. In every reading, nature has been replaced by plumbing and a man's most basic bodily act has been moved indoors and put under watch. Urinating against a tree is ordinary and unembarrassed, and the poem sets that against the self-conscious rules of the modern restroom.
The last stanza ties the two halves together through one carefully chosen word. "They would not have known / what to do / with so much saltpeter." Saltpeter has several associations, and the poem seems to use them all. It is a component of gunpowder, which keeps the military frame going. In folk legend it is slipped into soldiers' food to dampen their desire, which links it to the policing of the opening. It is also a nitrate, a kind of fertiliser, so it belongs to the vocabulary of growth. The trees, the poem suggests, would have been baffled by this chemical overload, a mix of explosives and suppressed desire. The short middle line, "what to do," seems to stumble in the same bewilderment. Whatever the trees might have done with urine, they would not have known what to do with a culture that treats the body as something to be dosed and monitored.
The poem is built from four unrhymed tercets in plain free verse. Short lines and everyday diction keep it brisk, and the constant "you" makes the reader the subject of the surveillance. The poem is significant because it packs so much into so little space: a joke about homophobia, a sketch of how masculinity gets drilled into men, and a small lament for a lost landscape. It also shows how a poem's setting can become part of its meaning. Because it addresses you in the one place where you cannot look away, it makes you feel the pressure it describes.