Nobody expects the dinner to turn on the diner, yet that is the first small shock of "The main course eating dirt." The grammar quietly swaps the roles, so the dish is doing the eating. Read the line as a pun and it gets darker. A "course" is also a path, and to "eat dirt" is to be humbled, so the main route of this life is a humiliating one that leads straight down. By the last line, "Body being consumed by the earth," the swap is complete. The eater has become the eaten, and the poem has looped back to where it began. That loop is the central idea of "Stationary 2": a life crowded with effort that goes nowhere except into the ground. The title backs this up. "Stationary" means not moving, and the numeral hints at a sequence, as though standing still were something that had to be repeated.
The second line is the only place a person speaks: "I wonder who I've hurt." Notice that the speaker says "who," not "whether." The harm is taken for granted, and only the victims are in doubt, which is a more uncomfortable confession than it first seems. The line also rhymes with "dirt," so the thought snaps shut before it can go anywhere. There is no name, no apology, no follow-up. The wondering feels as idle as it is guilty.
Then the poem turns into a list: "Goals and obligations. / Declarations so absurd." Neither line has a verb. Life is reduced to nouns, the entries on a calendar, with goals (what we choose) beside obligations (what we owe). "Obligations" and "declarations" rhyme on neighbouring words, so the sound repeats almost before the ear has recovered, like a stamp coming down twice on the same form. "So absurd" is the poem's one open verdict. It is unclear whether the declarations are the speaker's own vows or other people's grand announcements. Either way, the big talk is judged hollow.
Listen to the vowel in "dirt," "hurt," "absurd" and "earth." It is the same low, dull "ur" sound ("absurd" is a near-rhyme, since it ends in a "d"). Spread across six lines, it works like a thud, a spade going into soil, and it makes the poem sound as if it is already heading downward.
Line five is the hinge: "Revolving, never evolving." It is the only line with a rhyme inside it and a comma to break it, so it has the rhythm of a wheel, two beats, a turn, two beats, a turn. The words themselves hold the joke. "Revolving" contains "evolving" whole, with only an "r" in front. Progress sits inside the circle and cannot get out. Together with the title, I picture a stationary bicycle, legs pumping while the scenery stays put, though that image is my inference and the poem never states it.
The final line is the longest and the slowest, and it is the only one in which the body is passive. "Body" arrives with no "my" and no "the," as though it has already stopped being a person and become a thing. "Being consumed" is a continuing action, not a single moment, so death here is slow digestion. The earth also replaces the dirt, a lower word giving way to a larger and more final one, and its sound closes the poem's chime.
What makes the poem worth reading is how closely its form matches its argument. The lines are short and keep circling back. The rhymes repeat sounds instead of developing them. The first image returns in the last. A poem about a life that revolves without evolving is itself built to revolve. It also manages a grim humour, with its meal, its pun and its fake-polite "I wonder," without letting the joke soften the point. The poem does not say whether the stalled life is a warning or a diagnosis. It leaves the speaker's "I wonder" hanging, and the reader has to decide what to do with it.