Before the poem offers a single image, it offers three nicknames. "A gasper, a screamer, / a dog's cock," it says, passing them on from "the old type-setters" with the relish of someone sharing trade gossip: rude, affectionate, a little bit of a joke. Even "frozen at point" has a double edge. It can mean a mark halted at its dot, but it also suggests a hunting dog locked in its pointing stance, which would explain that last, earthy nickname. That is an inference, but it fits how playfully the poem treats language.
Then comes the swerve: "But it's older than / type." From here the poem is about the shape rather than the history of the name. An upright stroke above a single dot turns out to be something the world keeps making. The central idea is that the exclamation mark records a reaction, whether shock, wonder, dread or delight, that existed long before anyone wrote it down.
The poem builds this claim as one long, unbroken list. It runs on "a... a... a..." and ends with a late "or a," as if the speaker can't stop finding more. Lines are only two to four words long, and the enjambment is deliberately awkward: "thigh- / bone," "in lieu of / money." The reader's eye is pulled down the page the way the mark itself drops from stroke to point. There is no rhyme to tie things up. The poem relies on accumulation, and on a hissing run of s-sounds (slug, severed, snake, sand, sauropod, string, shells) that suggests a sharp intake of breath, a gasper in sound as well as shape.
The list is carefully varied. It begins with fragile natural things, a "dried / stalk trembling" and a slug's trail down "the moss face / of a cliff." It moves to the unsettling, "a severed / finger packed in ice," which also happens to be a pointing finger. Then come human objects marked by nerves and use: a pencil "pocked with toothmarks," a "microphone hung / from the ceiling" waiting for a voice. The "mud-dauber tube / like a tuneless flute" is a good example of the poem's logic, since it is an instrument with no music in it, a shout without words. Deep time arrives with the "extinct sauropod," and then human economy with the "string of drilled shells / used in lieu of / money." The final image, "a / gas flare on / an oil field / at night," is a small fire burning off waste in the dark, and the poem stops there on "night," as if it had been left standing in the dark itself.
After a white-space pause comes a change of voice: "Legend / says: the word / joy written vertically, / in Latin." The sentences are plainer and the story tidier. The phrase "Legend says" holds the claim at arm's length, and it matters that this neat origin comes after so many stranger and darker ones. The legend is also a new kind of picture. A "big letter I / balancing on a / full belly" is comic and warm, joy as the body's contentment. The capital I might even be read as the self standing upright on its own happiness, though the poem leaves that unsaid.
The ending reshapes everything before it. A mark we usually connect with alarm, a "screamer," turns out to include its opposite. The severed finger and the gas flare sit in the same family as the full belly. Exclamation, the poem implies, is the sound of being startled into life, whether by horror or by pleasure.
The poem's significance lies partly in its trick of form. It is a poem about a punctuation mark, set in a narrow column that is itself a long vertical stroke, and it finishes on something like a full stop. It also shows how metaphor works at its best: staring at something so familiar that we no longer see it, until it looks strange, ancient and a little funny. The title promises an origin. What the poem delivers is a crowd of them, which suggests that the real origin of the exclamation mark is simply the human habit of being amazed.