Try to paraphrase "Not This" and it slips out of your hands. Roses, a door, a rib-cage, a tuxedo, a beachball, a zebra: the nouns are vivid, but nothing joins them into a scene or an argument. That resistance is worth taking seriously, because the title seems to anticipate it. "Not This" refuses before the poem starts: not a story, not a confession, not a tidy image with a moral attached. What remains is a poem about how words behave when they follow their sounds instead of their sense.
The sound is where the poem is most deliberate. Almost every line is knotted together by repeated consonants. "onto the door a row of roses" is a chain of o's and r's, rolling forward like a wheel. In the next line "guts" and "gusts" are near twins, separated by a single s, and they ricochet off the hard g and j of "Inupiaq" and "jarring", so the words themselves feel jolted. "errors of a rare azure" loops through its r's and lets the z of "azure" glint at the end. Best of all is "martial tuxedo ratifies", where "martial" and "ratifies" share the same four letters, a, r, t, i, in a different order, as if one word had been picked up and set down again slightly to the side.
There is no end rhyme and no steady meter, but the poem isn't shapeless. The opening line has a loose four-beat sway, onto the DOOR, a ROW of ROses, and the rest of the poem frays it. The first stanza ends by leaving the single word "rambles" alone on a line, which both describes and demonstrates: the sentence wanders off and the line goes with it. The stanzas then shrink from four lines to two to two, and the last pair read almost like captions. "beachball before zebra" stacks its b's like a game of word association, and the poem closes on "Marrakesh", whose soft *sh* leaves a hush instead of a full stop.
The images look random but gather into loose clusters. The second and third lines are bodily and faintly threatening, with guts, a rib-cage, fire and gusts, set against the soft decoration of a row of roses on a door. Then the register shifts. "martial tuxedo ratifies" borrows the language of treaties and ceremonies (something war-like, something formal, something officially approved), and it is the closest the poem comes to a complete sentence, a subject and a verb. But the verb has no object. The approval has nothing to approve, and I'd suggest that this is the poem's quiet joke. The geography stretches too. "Inupiaq" points to the Arctic north of Alaska, "Marrakesh" to a Moroccan city, so the poem travels from freezing wind to a hot market town, with a patch of "azure" sky between them. The final stanza adds a toy and an animal, perhaps linked by their bands of pattern, and then a white stone, alabaster, which sounds like a travel-guide caption.
Grammar adds to the slipperiness. "fire hardy rambles" can be read several ways: "hardy" might be an adjective or a surname, and "rambles" might be a verb or a noun. "guts" could be a noun or a verb. Each reading is plausible and none is confirmed. The poem even begins with a door, "onto the door", and the reader keeps trying to walk through it, while the title calls out "Not This" after each attempt.
That is where its significance lies. The poem makes you notice that words have physical qualities, the grip of a g, the hiss of an s, the swing of repeated r's, apart from what a dictionary says they mean. It also exposes what we expect from a poem: a speaker, a situation, a point. When those are withheld, the expectation becomes visible, and so does the pleasure of simply listening. The best test is to read it aloud. Meaning stays elusive, but the mouth has a good time, and that may be exactly the lesson the title is pushing us toward.