Most poems about a dilemma begin with the dilemma. This one begins with trees, and it takes more than half its length to reach the choice that its title, "Either/Or," promises. That delay is its first clever move. By the time we read "One choice must destroy the others," we have spent a long stretch in a world where nothing is simply one thing or the other: leaves and roots exchanging "strange communication" across the "unseen," objects that come with their "shadows," absence living "within presence."
The central idea, as I read it, is that a life's competing possibilities cannot all be kept, yet the present moment can hold them together anyway. The speaker says "we speak of the life we had, of / the one we now have & / those we still want all / suspended at once." Past, present and future crowd into one sentence, and "suspended" quietly picks up the trees "swaying" in the opening line: hanging, balanced, not yet fallen. Choosing will end that balance, and the verb for it is blunt: "destroy." But then comes "& yet," and the poem swerves away from deciding. What matters is "the scent / of each other / as it lingers / upon us." The poem seems to address two people, perhaps lovers judging by the intimacy of that image, though it never says so. What survives every choice is the trace they leave on one another.
The form carries this argument. There is no regular meter and no rhyme scheme, and the lines are scattered across the page with deep indents, so reading feels like watching things drift. Some words are stranded alone, like "green," set apart on its own line like a single leaf. It also rhymes with "unseen" on the line above, the only clean rhyme in the poem, tucked in so that it registers as a faint chime rather than a pattern. "Pollen" and "fallen" half-rhyme in the same way. Near the end the lines step rightward ("is all / that matters"), as though the voice is trailing off or leaning in toward someone.
Then there is the ampersand. Every "&" is a small refusal of the title's slash. "Either/Or" divides, while "&" adds. The poem uses it at its most important hinges: "the one we now have &", "the others / & yet", "& the rest." Even the grammar leans toward both/and, so the speaker's attitude is built into the punctuation before it is stated.
The imagery works the same way. Pollen and seeds are things that travel and settle, and they mean two opposite things at once: pollen is future life, while fallen seeds are possibilities that never took root. Thoughts "flowing forward surround us / like pollen" turns something abstract into something physical, and the closing scent is pollen's sensory cousin. Scent is a well-chosen sense for this poem, because it is invisible, cannot be held, and lingers after its source has moved on. It is the "unseen" of the opening, brought close enough to breathe.
One line stands out as the most abstract and the grandest: "a vast symmetry of blossoming energy." Set off by white space, it sounds like the speaker reaching for a big phrase to name the harmony of the opening scene. The poem does not stay there. It drops at once into the small, human "We," the "life we had," the smell on skin. The move suggests that large patterns matter less than the closeness of two people in one moment.
The ending is the boldest gesture. "The weight / of silence / behind words that define us" appears early, and at the close the poem admits that "the rest / cannot be expressed…" The ellipsis lets silence finish the sentence, so the poem enacts the limit it describes instead of merely stating it.
What makes it worth reading is its honesty. It does not pretend that choosing is painless, since "must destroy" is a hard phrase. Nor does it solve the problem. It changes where we look, away from the loss that every decision brings and toward the one thing the present still holds. A poem about being forced to choose ends by choosing to stay, briefly and fully, in the moment before the choice.