A man is emptied and weighed down in the same breath. The opening command, "Fill this man with dulled gold," sets a ritual, almost clinical tone, and the next line continues it: someone is to "pry his riches of vocality from his lips." His voice becomes treasure, and treasure is something taken by force. The gold is already "dulled," its value tarnished, while his heartbeat "rises and dips" and the room "grows cold." We never learn who gives these orders. The poem reads like instructions for a sacrifice or a slow death, and that anonymous, commanding voice is part of its menace.
The second stanza explains what ails him in far plainer language. "He misses the hair she had. / He misses the kisses of passion." The repetition is deliberately dull, and what he clings to is a small physical detail, hair, in the past tense of "had." "He longed till he grew sad" is almost childlike in its flatness, which makes the jump to "Then he marred himself in grotesque fashion" more jarring. The poem doesn't say how he marred himself, and that vagueness lets the line land harder. The rhyme of "passion" with "fashion" feels a little forced, but the clumsiness could be read as part of the poem's bluntness, since grief here has no polish.
Watch the pronouns. The man begins as "this man," a specimen, then becomes "he," and by the third stanza he is "you." The distance collapses, and the reader is pulled into his position. This stanza also changes the music. The lines shrink to two or three beats and pair off in couplets: "Let her flee, / Root like a tree." The chime is nursery-rhyme simple, which makes the advice sound both soothing and sinister. Rooting like a tree might mean steadiness or loyalty, but the stanza's next couplet suggests otherwise: "Scream into the abyss, / About what you miss." Here "He misses" from the previous stanza becomes "you miss," and the sing-song rhyme of "abyss" and "miss" shrinks something enormous into a chant.
The final stanza follows the tree's fate downward. First "Branches rot," then "Roots get eaten," then "By the ground you get caught." The movement goes from the top of the tree to its base to burial, a reverse of the heartbeat that "rises" in the first stanza. The rhymes also loosen. "Rot" and "caught" only half-match, as do "eaten" and "beaten," so the poem's sound decays along with its image. Staying fixed in place, which seemed like faithfulness, turns out to be a trap.
The last line, "By her: you are beaten," has a colon that works like a drumroll before the verdict. It also connects back to the title, which trails off in an ellipsis: "At A Game You Thought Yours..." Read together, title and ending form one sentence, you are beaten at a game you thought yours. The poem never names the game, but the phrase suggests he believed he held the upper hand in a relationship, or believed the outcome was settled. "Beaten" also carries two meanings, defeated and physically battered, which echoes the earlier line about marring himself.
The poem's strength lies in how its form acts out its subject. The first stanza is the most ornate, with its "riches of vocality," an enclosed rhyme scheme and long lines. As the man shrinks, the language does too, moving through alternating rhyme, then couplets, then short lines like "Roots get eaten." The voice that was once a treasure is reduced to blunt, monosyllabic words. Some of the rhymes are obvious, but that obviousness suits a poem about how a mind goes round and round the same few words: miss, miss, miss. The result suggests that grief which refuses to move on becomes a kind of self-destruction, and it makes that point through images of decay rather than explanation.