Start with the first word: "are." There is no subject in front of it, so the poem begins mid-sentence, as if we have walked into a conversation already underway. The title, "Not This," adds to the feeling. It seems to answer a question we never heard, or to reject something we can't see. Whatever "are the gulf of pirate thumb," the title insists it is not the thing we might expect. The poem is built on this kind of dislocation, and it makes a good case study in what happens when sound and association, rather than plain statement, decide where a line goes next.
Read it for sense and the poem slips away. A "gulf of pirate thumb" is not a thing, and neither are "ginseng buzzards." Read it for sound and a pattern appears. "Gulf" turns into "golf" a few lines later, one vowel changed. A gulf is water, a place for pirates to sail, and golf is a game played on grass, so the poem moves from the sea to a lawn on the strength of a single letter. "Ginger" and "ginseng" begin with the same sounds, and both are plants dug out of the ground, which suits a poem so interested in things being "hidden." The hard *g* keeps coming back, in gulf, ginger, ego, golf and garage, and it gives the lines a slightly gulping, percussive texture.
The repetition of "hidden" is the poem's most deliberate structure. Lines two to four nest one thing inside another: the ginger is hidden in ego, then the ginseng buzzards are hidden "in the idea of the ego." The second version is one step further removed, because it is hidden in the *idea* of something rather than the thing itself. Judging by the wording, the poem seems to enjoy this regress, a Russian doll of abstractions. The buzzards add a comic twist, since a buzzard is hardly a hidden bird. It circles in plain view. Putting it in a hiding place is a small absurdity that pokes at the whole idea of the ego as a secret chamber.
Rhythm and syntax work with that regress. There is no punctuation and no capital letters, and the lines are short, so the first four read like a list that never gets its main clause. The break after "hidden" at the end of line three, with "in the idea of the ego" spilling into the next line, makes the reader hang for a beat before the phrase lands. There is no rhyme at all, so the sound-echoes of gulf/golf and ginger/ginseng have to carry the music.
Then the poem turns. "Depart the thumb" is the only command, and it comes just after the thumb has appeared for the second time. The word frames the poem, since the pirate thumb is where it begins and what we are told to leave. Next comes "the pirates are at golf," where "are" finally has a subject, echoing the opening word. The sentence that started out headless is, in a sense, completed. And where do these pirates turn up? "Behind our humble garage." Only here does "our" appear, and the plain adjective "humble" lands hard after all the inflated talk of ego. The swashbuckling vocabulary ends in a suburban backyard. This is a joke, but it also feels like a deliberate deflation.
So what is the central idea? There are several possible readings, and the poem refuses to settle on one. It may be about how readers hunt for hidden meaning and how language can keep supplying decoys. The ego, hidden inside ideas of itself, may stand for that endless search. The ending may suggest that all the grand, mysterious material has a tame, everyday home. None of this is certain, and the title, "Not This," seems to warn against any tidy answer.
That is where the poem's significance lies for a student reader. It shows how much of what we call meaning depends on habit: we expect a subject for every verb, a logic behind every image. By stripping those supports away and leaving only echo, repetition and a surprising final location, the poem makes us notice our own expectations. It is nonsense that behaves like sense, and the effort of working out why is the experience it offers.