"You can keep the hidden treasures" sounds like someone pushing a prize back across the table. From that first line the speaker turns down the usual idea of value, the buried, secret, hard-to-find thing, and asks a listener to attend to what is already there. The poem is about choosing presence over possession. Everything it offers is plain: feet, earth, sky, a hand, fingernails.
The poem works by pointing. "These are my feet," the speaker says, then "this is the Earth," then "this hand," and finally just "this." The word "this" keeps shrinking the world to whatever can be indicated in the moment, and the flat statement "There is nothing here except this" sounds less like a complaint than like relief. The directions matter too. First we "look below" and find "the substance / of year after year," a phrase that makes time feel like sediment, something you could stand on. Then we "look up," where the silence is so complete that "you can / hear yourself blinking." That tiny sound is a funny exaggeration, but it also suggests how closely the speaker wants us to pay attention.
Between these two looks comes the gentlest moment: "We spent days naming clouds. / There were shapes of animals." The tense changes to the past and a "we" appears, which hints at a shared memory, though the poem never says who the other person is. Naming clouds is a useless, delightful game, and it is also what poets do, giving words to shapes that won't stay put. The lines suggest that a day spent this way was not wasted.
The body then enters as a clock. "It all comes back to / this hand, // these growing nails, / hair where there was // none." The line break before "none" leaves that word alone on its line, so the emptiness is visible on the page just before the poem moves on. The growth is slow and a little uncanny, and the poem doesn't say whether it means childhood, ageing or something else. Either way, time here is something happening to a body, not an idea.
The poem also comments on its own form. "No, I told you, / there is no meter // to maintain these words / in order." The "No" suggests an argument already under way, with a listener who wanted structure, rules or secrets. The poem refuses all three. It has no rhyme, no regular beat, and its short lines break in awkward places ("and / below," "there was / none"). The lines are loosely grouped in twos and threes, but nothing holds them in a pattern except attention. Calling the lines "in order" is a small joke, since the poem has just said it won't keep any.
The one line that sounds like a proverb is "The true treasure of El Dorado / was what was not robbed." El Dorado is the legendary land of gold that European explorers chased, and the verb "robbed" makes the chase sound like plunder. The line turns the legend around: the real wealth was whatever the searchers didn't take. In a poem made of "sky / and rock," that suggests the ground and air are the treasure that survives every theft. This is an inference from the poem's imagery, but the surrounding lines support it.
The ending ties back to the beginning. "Keep the change" is a casual phrase from shops and taxis, so even the final refusal comes in the language of money. After that, "I am standing firmly here" returns to the feet of the second stanza. The speaker has gone around the whole circle and ended up where he began, now on firmer ground.
The poem matters because of how little it asks for. It doesn't tell us that simplicity is good, since it shows a speaker who has made a choice and is standing in it. The tone is dry and the language everyday, and the boldest claim comes in a single sentence about a legend. Readers who expect poems to hide something beneath the surface may find that this one hides nothing, and that is exactly its point.