Ten words are enough for Jimmy Dean Inman to carry a whole history from beginning to end, and then to refuse to let it end. "Nothing" never says who "we" are. They could be lovers, friends, a family or a team, and the poem gives no hint. That silence leaves room for the reader's own story. What the poem does give us is a shape: a start with something, a finish with nothing, and a memory that keeps everything. Its central idea is that loss does not erase. What has vanished from the world stays whole in the mind, and the poem leaves open whether that is a comfort or a wound.
The title sets a trap. "Nothing" announces the verdict before we have read a line, but the poem's last word is "everything", which quietly contradicts it. If the speaker remembers everything, the ending can't have been nothing. The poem seems to correct its own title as it goes. The three line-endings, "something," "nothing," "everything," share the suffix "-thing" and work like a dial turned through three settings: some, no, every. Only the quantity changes. This almost-rhyme is really the same word returning with a different prefix, so the poem sounds like an echo, which suits a poem about memory.
The rhythm is loose and close to speech, with no strict metre, but the line lengths are telling. Counting syllables gives roughly six, five and seven. The middle line, the one about ending in nothing, is the shortest, as though the poem itself has been hollowed out. Then the last line stretches, and "remember everything" rolls forward on its run of soft syllables. Every line also ends on an unstressed syllable ("-thing," "-thing," "-thing"), so each one trails off instead of landing with a thud. The poem never slams a door. It fades, and then it is overruled by memory.
The grammar does much of the emotional work. "We became with something" is slightly odd. We would expect "became something," and "with" makes it sound as if the pair set out accompanied by, or equipped with, some unnamed thing. The next line repeats that "with" ("Ended with nothing"), but the subject has vanished. "We" appears once, in the opening line, and never comes back. The poem enacts the loss it describes by letting the pronoun drop away.
The last line is more ambiguous still. Without a subject, "But remember everything" can be read as a statement, "(we) remember," or as a command, "remember!" The first makes memory a fact, something that happens to us whether we want it to or not. The second makes it a duty or a plea, perhaps addressed to the other person or to the speaker. Both readings are available, and the poem never chooses. The small word "But" is the hinge. Everything before it is subtraction, and everything after it is a refusal to subtract.
There is almost no imagery in the usual sense, no weather, objects or places. The words are abstract on purpose. "Something" and "everything" are blank containers, and the reader fills them. There is an irony here too. The speaker claims to remember everything yet names nothing in particular, and the specifics stay private, as they tend to in real memory. Judging by the language, the poem trusts the reader to know what the something was.
That trust is where its significance lies. Many readers have felt that a loss can leave you with less and more at once: less to hold, and more than you can put down. Inman compresses that paradox into three plain sentences, a beginning, an ending and an aftermath, and leaves the final word to the one thing that has not been lost.