Francis Scudellari starts by inventing a word. "Sometimes-things" are objects that are only occasionally more than objects: a chair in a dark room, a shape that "isn't drawn clearly enough." The hyphen fuses a time word with a thing word, so the category depends on the speaker's mood as much as on the objects themselves. Most of the time, he admits, "They're most times things." But now and then they "feel much closer to something living," and the poem is an attempt to explain that feeling to someone lying beside him.
That listener gives the poem its tone. "Come lie back / down with me here, I'll tell you about them" sounds like a late-night whisper, and later the speaker breaks off to check on his audience: "are you still listening," "No don't get up. I'm almost done." The poem is a confession, and the speaker seems afraid it will sound foolish. He catches himself as he goes: "I know I disappoint myself by thinking it." He cannot say the things move or speak ("It's not that they speak or move"). What he senses is "something / in the way they lie so still but are still shaking / within."
The best image comes when he corrects his own word. "Are you shaking now too? No it's not shaking, / it's a hum." He then widens the hum into a picture of "a string" that "continues to play its song, / much later than, long after, we've stopped listening." The sound outlasts attention, and the line itself lingers, with "Long" ending one line and the phrase "Long / after we've stopped" repeating it. Earlier, the visual image "Black sits on black, / then it moves around to white" shows a dim room slowly shifting as the eye adjusts. Both images suggest a world that keeps going quietly whether or not anyone is watching.
The construction supports this. The poem runs in rhyming couplets, but many of the rhymes are the same word repeated: "aren't / aren't," "them / them," "shaking / shaking," "not / not," "then / then," "sometimes / sometimes." Real rhymes appear too, such as "black / back," "song / long," and "find / behind." The effect is like an echo or a string still vibrating. The speaker keeps arriving back at the same word, as if he can't quite get past it. The lines are long and loosely metrical, closer to speech than to song, and the enjambment keeps the sentences tumbling over line breaks. The punctuation is full of interruptions, questions and dashes, so the poem feels like thinking out loud.
Only once does the poem let an object come fully alive, and even then it hedges: "The wind can / make such a pretty knocking sound if the tree's hands / will play along." The branches become hands, but only "if" they cooperate. The speaker's own position is stated through distance: "the blank somewhere spaces where I lag behind / them," where he "craves to catch up." The odd phrase "blank somewhere spaces" bends a word the same way "sometimes-things" does. In both, the vagueness is deliberate, because this is a poem about what can't be pinned down.
The ending shifts from curiosity to something like acceptance. He wants to be "that someone / who's willing to live sometimes like them" (still, humming, undemanding) "and when / not, not frightened of some place where I'll lie down by them." The poem has been about lying down from the start, in "Come lie back / down with me." By the end, lying down seems to carry a second meaning. Judging by the phrasing, it suggests rest, but also death, a "place" where the speaker will be among still things himself. The awkward double negative, "not, not frightened," sounds like a person talking himself into calm.
The poem matters because it handles an experience most people have had, the sense that objects are watching or almost alive, without inflating it into mysticism. The speaker doubts his own feeling ("Can they be, when I know they're not?") but keeps it anyway. That honesty gives the poem its quiet strength. It suggests that paying attention to still, half-seen things might be a way of getting used to our own stillness, and the intimacy of the "you" beside him makes that thought feel gentle rather than grim.