Nobody in Francis Scudellari's poem actually gathers. The verb stays in the conditional, "We could gather," and the poem says it twice, as if the speaker keeps nudging a door that nobody has pushed open. The poem never says who "we" are, and I won't guess. What it does show is a closeness that is within reach but is being put off, and the poem's central idea is that putting it off is itself something we do, a habit with its own grammar. Underneath that is a gentler claim: once the avoiding stops, the ordinary place and the ordinary togetherness turn out to be enough.
The imagery of the first half is physical and a little clumsy, which is its charm. Elbows are "kinked," fingers "wiggly," and the picture of everyone fitting together is made from awkward angles rather than neat ones. Then comes the knot, which the poem takes a whole stanza to get right. There is "the knot / of a smoothed-down board," the tidy, sanded kind, and there is the other knot, "all bumps and twists," tied "when we didn't tie knots / very well, but we tied them / close and tight." The word "tied" is repeated three times, and the sentence loops back on itself the way a poorly tied knot would. Judging by this memory, the closeness being imagined is an older one, from a time of clumsy hands. The poem prefers the imperfect knot because it held.
The setting is a "creek / we call a brook to make it feel / magical." Here the poem is funny. The magic it conjures is "that kind of magic / where frogs speak their curses / before they splash off." Fairy-tale frogs and spells are in the background, but "curses" also means swearing, so the frogs sound like grumpy neighbors who mutter and leave. The enchantment is homemade and slightly comic, and the speaker seems to know it. That prepares the last line, where the speaker concedes that "a creek / isn't any less magical than a brook." Renaming a place was a way of dressing it up, and the poem ends by taking the costume off.
The strangest and best idea is the word "rather." It is hidden inside "gather," since take away the g and "gather" becomes "rather." The poem exploits this. It turns "I'd rather not" into a noun, "the rathers we've used not to," and then into a verb: "rathering not to be gathering." The sound is nearly the same and the meaning is opposite, so the two words end up pulling against each other. The poem has built a small language for evasion, and it shows how ordinary reluctance is. Nobody says "I refuse to see you." They say "I'd rather not," again and again, until those words have done the refusing. The same sound runs through "gather," "together," "rathers," "rathering" and "gathering," so even the vocabulary seems to be fitting together elbow to elbow.
The form works in the same way. There are five unrhymed quatrains and no fixed meter, but the poem is held together by enjambment, so sentences slide across line breaks and stanza breaks. "Not the knot" is left dangling at the end of the first stanza, and the explanation only arrives in the second. The poem is also really just two long sentences. Two parenthetical asides interrupt them, one opening in stanza one and closing in stanza three, the other holding the frogs. The asides sound like things said quietly, almost under the breath. The voice is that of someone who keeps interrupting themselves, which suits a speaker working up to something.
The poem matters because it takes a very common human behavior, drifting away from people we could easily be near, and gives it vocabulary and a gentle fix. It doesn't scold. The solution is modest: "not speak" the excuses, show up, and notice "how we fit." That last phrase echoes the title and covers both senses of "fit," the physical one of elbows and the emotional one of belonging. The poem never says whether the gathering happens. It ends on the possibility, plainly worded, which seems right, because the poem is more interested in making it possible to say yes than in the yes itself.