Read «Not This» looking for a message and it slips sideways, like the fish in its first line. Jim Leftwich gives us six short lines made almost entirely of nouns, with no full sentence to hold on to. The natural question is "what does it mean?", and the title seems to answer in advance: not this. Not the tidy paraphrase, not the neat moral. Yet the poem is far from random noise. It is carefully built, and what it builds is a demonstration of how the mind behaves when it meets a heap of unrelated things.
Start with the first stanza: "bat horoscope flounder / beach azalea jesters." Each line has three words and, by standard pronunciation, six syllables, so the two lines mirror each other on the page. The contents, though, do not match at all. A nocturnal animal, a system for predicting fortunes and a flatfish sit beside a shoreline, a flowering shrub and a troupe of fools. Nothing explains why they belong together, so the reader starts supplying reasons: two creatures, two bits of landscape, a prophecy and some clowns. The words also double up. "Flounder" is a fish but also a verb for thrashing about helplessly, and "bat" can be a verb too. There are faint sound links as well, such as the b of "bat" and "beach" at the line openings and the matching endings of "flounder" and "jesters." These ties are real but slight, enough to suggest order without confirming it.
The second stanza shrinks to two words a line, and the vocabulary turns inward. "Swerve akin" holds a small contradiction: to swerve is to veer away, while to be akin is to be related. Something moves off course and stays kin to what it left. "Dendrites arrayed" shifts from the beach to the brain. Dendrites are the branching ends of nerve cells, and the word comes from the Greek for "tree." Judging by the imagery, the poem here turns to the machinery that does the connecting, the neural branches by which a reader links bat to flounder or azalea to jester. Meanwhile "arrayed" introduces the word the poem will keep returning to.
That word returns in the final stanza, "nor lake array a halo / our disarray," and it changes shape each time: "arrayed," then "array," then "disarray." The prefix *dis-* undoes what the word builds, so the poem's closing movement, from arrangement to its undoing, happens inside a single word. It also gives the poem its one true rhyme. "Array" and "disarray" chime across the line break, and the poem ends on the sound of the very thing it describes.
The grammar of this stanza is worth slowing down for. "Nor" normally continues a negative, as in "not this, nor that." Nothing precedes it except the title, so "Not This" works as the first half of a sentence that the whole poem then completes. What is refused is a picture: a lake arranging a halo, perhaps a ring of light settling on still water. It is a calm, shining, almost holy image, and the poem pushes it away. Then comes the only pronoun in the text, "our." Until this point the poem has been all objects, and in the last line a human group appears to claim the mess. The disarray is not out there on the beach. It belongs to us.
So the central idea seems to be the human habit of pattern-making and its limits. Horoscopes, neural branches, arrays and halos are all ways of arranging scattered things into a shape, and the poem lets each arrangement tremble on the edge of falling apart. With no punctuation or capital letters, it never tells us where phrases end, so even the grammar is something the reader has to decide. Whether "flounder" is a fish or a failure, whether "array" is a noun or a verb, is our call.
That is what makes the poem worth studying. It will not hand over a theme, but it lets you watch yourself hunting for one: grouping the nouns, hearing the echoes, wanting the halo to mean something. By the final line you notice that the wanting is the subject. It is a good test case for a question every reader of poetry meets sooner or later, which is how much of a poem's meaning sits in the words and how much we bring to them.