Start with the title, because it sends you to the dictionary. "Liminoid" echoes "liminal," a word built on the Latin for threshold, and the ending -oid means "resembling." So the poem is named for something that looks like a threshold without quite being one. That small hedge turns out to matter, because the speaker keeps approaching crossings and never arrives anywhere.
The first couplet gives the poem its strangest move: "doors confess all / to my hand." We usually imagine a person confessing to a priest, but here the doors do the confessing and the hand plays confessor. The word "hand" matters too. This is knowledge by touch, not by sight: the chill of a latch, the give or stubbornness of a hinge, the grain of the wood. The imagery suggests a dark house at night, though the poem never says so. And "all" is a huge word, because it promises total disclosure. Yet we never learn what the doors confessed. The poem claims full revelation and keeps its own secrets, as closed as the doors it describes.
The middle couplet works like a hinge: "one of the many / temptations of faith." There is no punctuation and no capital letter, so the phrase can swing either way. Read backward, it says that trusting a door to tell you everything is itself an act of faith, and a tempting one. Read forward, it prepares us for the pacing that follows. The phrasing is also surprising. We expect temptations to pull us away from faith, but here faith is what tempts. It tempts you to believe that something waits behind every door and that every threshold leads to revelation. "The many" adds a tired familiarity, as if the speaker has met these temptations often.
Only in the last couplet does the speaker say "I," and the word arrives late. In the opening lines the speaker was just "my hand," a single body part, and now a whole heavy body appears: "to and fro I lumber." "Lumber" is a clumsy, dragging verb, but it is also another word for timber, so you can hear the speaker becoming the same material as the doors. "To and fro" is the motion of a door on its hinges, movement without progress, and the phrase's own sound rocks back and forth. Then comes the flattest line of all: "and never go to sleep." The word "go" is telling. It treats sleep as a place you travel to, one more threshold the speaker cannot cross. "Never" matches the absolute "all" of the opening, and the two big words frame the poem like a pair of doorposts.
The form supports this quietly. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capitalisation, just three couplets in plain speech. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly four, three, five, five, six, six, so the poem lengthens as it goes, like a walker's pace settling into a plod. It ends on "sleep," a long, drawn-out vowel that lingers on the very thing the speaker is denied. With no full stop after it, the poem is left slightly ajar, which suits a text about thresholds that never quite close or complete.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. Religious vocabulary ("confess," "faith") is moved into an ordinary, sleepless, domestic scene, and the effect is both comic and sad. The sacred starts to look like insomnia, a restless checking of doors in case one of them finally explains itself. The poem never says whether the faith is religious or simply the belief that the world is readable if you touch it carefully enough, and that openness is part of its power. In the end it shows what "liminoid" implies: a person caught in the rituals of crossing over, rehearsing the motions of arrival and never completing them.