A man flings open a door and isn't there. As a joke, it only works if you don't think about it too hard, and the poem's trick is to make the speaker think about it very hard indeed. What begins as a story the speaker's brother used to tell, "a humorous fiction," ends as a quiet, unsettling statement about the speaker's own relationship to time and presence.
The first half is the tale itself, told in short, matter-of-fact lines. The phrase "But wasn't there" works almost like a refrain, returning with a slight change ("But he wasn't there") after the sounds of the living world have been laid out: "a bird chirping / Or a dog yipping." These details matter. They tell us that the scene is full of life, with birds, dogs and a door that unlocks by itself, and that the only missing element is the man. The verb "threw wide" is theatrical and energetic, the gesture of someone arriving. Set against it, the flat "wasn't there" makes the absence feel like a punchline, and also a small act of vanishing.
Then the poem turns on its oddest line: "I distress that will happen." The grammar is strained. "Distress" is not normally something you do to a future event, and that awkwardness feels deliberate, or at least productive. It makes worry sound like an action, something the speaker keeps busy with. The fear is simple and enormous: "the door might open / But I won't be there." The joke has migrated from the brother's story into the speaker's imagination, where it has stopped being funny. The shift from the playful past ("used to tell") to the conditional ("might open") and the future ("won't be there") traces how amusement hardens into anxiety.
The final movement collapses all of that into the present tense. "I unlock, turn, open" is three verbs with no conjunctions and no cushioning, each one a separate physical act. Notice who is doing the work now. In the brother's tale the door seems to open of its own accord ("The door would unlock"), but here the speaker performs every step, and the result is the same. Taking charge doesn't solve the problem. The dog is still there, but its sound has changed. The cheerful "yipping" has become a bare "Dog barks," with no article and no adjective, closer to a stage direction than a description. Then comes the fragment "Not there," which sounds like a report on the speaker's own state of mind.
The last line, "Not coeval with the door," is the poem's biggest surprise. "Coeval" is a formal, almost scholarly word meaning of the same age or existing at the same time, and it lands oddly after so much plain speech. That clash is the point. Having tried ordinary words for the feeling and found them inadequate, the speaker reaches for something exact and cold. The problem is no longer physical location but timing: the speaker and the door do not share the same moment. One reading is that the speaker feels permanently out of step with their own life, always arriving a beat after things happen. Another, judging by the way the fear is framed around the future, is that the door stands for the moment when the world carries on without the speaker. The poem doesn't choose between these, and it is stronger for leaving both open.
Its significance lies in this compression. There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm, only short, plain lines that sound like speech and leave white space for the unsaid. The repeated "there" and "door" keep the language circling the same spot, like someone who can't stop checking a lock. The poem takes the shape of a shaggy-dog story and quietly turns it into a meditation on absence, showing how a joke told in childhood can become a private fear in adulthood. It leaves us with an uncomfortable question: if you can open the door yourself and still not be present, what exactly does being "there" require?