Say the first line aloud and your tongue nearly trips: "Sharp stings through violin strings." That tongue-twisting quality is the poem's method. "A Duet" says very little in plain statement. Instead it lets one sound breed the next, until music, memory and injury seem to belong to the same family of words. The poem comes with no context beyond its title, so everything here rests on the text. Its central idea, as far as the words allow, is that closeness between two people is both harmony and wound, and the two are hard to pull apart.
The opening four lines set the pattern. "Strings," "springs," "sings" and "wings" share one rhyme, so the whole section hums on a single note. "Springs" appears twice with different weights. The "lost springs" can be read as vanished seasons of hope or youth, while "hot springs" are warm, living water. A spring is also a coil under tension, which suits a violin string pulled tight. Meanwhile "violin" and "violence" sound so alike that the second line slips from one to the other: "Bring the violence of lost springs." The music arrives already carrying harm. Then comes the paradox behind the title: "she sings / Silently as his wings / Unfurl." A duet needs two voices, yet one sings without sound and the other answers with wings opening. The partnership feels real but wordless.
The single words set off in dashes, "Unfurl" and "Contact," work like cues in a musical score, or stage directions, pauses where the poem changes gear. After "Unfurl" the rhythm tightens into a chant. "Fifty flounders waged in war" falls into a drumbeat of stressed-then-unstressed syllables, and the next line picks up its last word to begin again: "war / Warped." Each line seems bent out of the one before, which makes the conflict feel inherited. The pair "flounders" and "founders" is the neatest trick here. To flounder is to thrash about clumsily, a ship founders when it sinks, and a founder is someone who begins something. The warring figures are "warped from" their own beginnings, which "they ignore / Until their aching needs adore." The poem seems to suggest a quarrel whose origins are forgotten, softened only when desire takes over from reason. The grammar is odd, because it is the needs themselves that adore, as if longing had become a kind of worship.
"Contact" does the same job as "Unfurl," but more literally, because its own letters seed what follows. "Tact" sits inside it, and sure enough we get "Tactful marks," then "the sharpest tacks." Politeness and pin lie side by side, so the touch is gentle in manner and sharp in effect. A cluster of rhymes, "marks," "remarks," "stark" and "arc," presses the lines together, and "back" is repeated, "bring back remarks / On his back." The words are physical now. The "words so stark" are written, or felt, on his body, and in the last line the pronoun shifts: they "bite right down, her spinal arc." What is on his back ends up in hers. That is the real duet, two bodies registering one pain. "Arc" might also recall the curve of a bow, which would turn her spine into the instrument the first line began with. That is an inference, but the violin imagery makes it hard to ignore.
The poem also moves through the senses. It starts with sound that is silent, shifts to the sight of wings unfurling, and ends in touch. As it moves inward from air to skin, the music becomes more intimate and more painful.
What makes the poem worth reading is that its sound carries the meaning. It never tells us whether the relationship is love, conflict or both, and the dense echoes make us feel that ambiguity instead. Notice how often a rhyme works as an argument, with "strings" leading to "stings" and "tact" to "tacks." It is a good example of how sound can do the thinking in a poem.