Three small scenes make up "Evanescent Enigma", and each one is smaller than the last. First comes the whole universe, then a single love affair, then the way strangers look at us. The same worry runs through all three: what people see of us, or what we manage to be to each other, is only a sliver of what it cost to get there. The title says as much. "Evanescent" means vanishing, "enigma" means unreadable, and the poem sets out to show a person who is both.
The opening line is the only full, grammatical sentence, and it is deliberately grand: "We're all but wistful sighs in the grand monologue of a loquacious universe." The vocabulary is heavy and Latinate, with "loquacious" and "monologue" doing the lifting. The universe talks and talks, and nobody answers, because a monologue has no listener. Humans are not even words in that speech, only sighs, which are breath with no sentence attached. The phrase "all but" is slippery. It can mean "nothing except" or "very nearly," and the line works either way: we are only sighs, or we are almost sighs, almost nothing. The "wistful" is the one soft note in all that scale, a hint that the sighs long for something.
Then the poem drops into broken, human-sized lines. "Making mistakes / Lost myself / in the depths of your soul" begins like a romantic cliché, where losing yourself in someone is meant to be a compliment. The poem refuses to leave it there. "Or rather, I drowned." That correction is the most striking moment in the text. The speaker revises the line as they say it, trading the pretty version for the true one. "Lost" is gentle and still leaves room for being found, while "drowned" does not. The short, unfinished lines, with no clear subject in "Making mistakes," also read like someone thinking aloud and not yet sure how to say it.
The last section opens with the single word "Inhibitions," which sits above the lines like a label. "They see the flash of pearls, / Not the seashells that / had to be broken open." The "they" is never named, and that works in the poem's favor, since it could be an audience, admirers, or anyone who sees only the finished result. "Flash" suggests a quick, glittering glance, which echoes the vanishing in the title. The line break after "that" holds the shells back for a beat, so the reader meets the breaking just as the sentence reaches it. Strictly speaking, pearls grow inside oysters and other molluscs, so "seashells" is used loosely here for the hard casing. The loose use still serves the point, because the shell stands for the guarded, defended self, and "inhibitions" are what that hardness feels like from inside. The passive phrase "had to be broken open" adds to the effect. Nobody is named as the one who breaks the shell, so the pain seems to happen without a culprit, and "had to" makes it sound necessary, even if it was not fair.
The poem is in free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. The loose form suits its subject, since a tidy rhyme scheme would clash with a speaker who is drowning. Punctuation helps with pacing. A comma and a full stop close the drowning couplet firmly, while the final line has no full stop at all, so the poem trails off with the shell still open. Its images also travel from air to water, from "sighs" to "depths," "drowned," and "seashells." It is as if the speaker begins by looking up at the sky and ends on the seabed.
The poem's quiet pairing of cosmic emptiness with private damage is what gives it weight. It suggests that feeling insignificant in the universe and feeling invisible to the people around us are the same ache at different scales. The signature "hee haw," which sounds like a donkey's bray, is an odd contrast to such solemn diction. It reads, perhaps, as a wry mask over the sincerity. The poem asks readers to look past the gleam of whatever finished thing someone shows them and to remember the breaking that came before it.