Six lines, two definitions, and neither would survive in a dictionary. Jim Leftwich's "Not This" says what *warmer* would be and what *grammar* would be, but it answers by pointing sideways instead of explaining.
The title sounds like a reply to a question we never heard. "Not this" is what you say to a wrong guess, and the first line, "warmer would be," borrows the language of the children's game where "warmer" means you are closing in on the hidden object. Read that way, the poem is a set of hints from someone who refuses to hand over the thing itself. The poem never names the game, so this is an interpretation, but the title and opening line fit it neatly.
The first line also bends grammar. "Warmer" is a comparative adjective, yet it stands where a noun belongs, as the subject of "would be." So before the poem tells us anything about grammar, it has already pushed a word out of its usual job. The second stanza then makes grammar the subject outright, and the poem ends up testing its own claim. The conditional "would be" keeps everything hypothetical. Nothing is declared to be so. Each definition is only offered as a possibility.
The first definition is the harder one: "sentences conjoined with / complacent gratuity." "Conjoined" is a technical, almost classroom word, close to "conjunction," the part of speech that links clauses. But the glue here is "complacent gratuity," a phrase that suggests unearned ease. A gratuity is a tip, something extra and unasked for. "Complacent" means smugly comfortable, which also echoes the cosiness of "warmer." One plausible reading is a quiet jab at fluent, comfortable prose that fastens one sentence to the next without asking whether the link is needed. Warmth, in this case, is the problem. Sound matters too. "Complacent gratuity" is a mouthful of long Latinate syllables, and it ends the stanza in a slightly pompous roll of *-ent* and *-ity*.
The second stanza answers with a plain, visual image: "the space between / carrots in a glass." After the abstraction of the first stanza, the words are short and concrete. Carrot sticks standing in a glass are a domestic, faintly comic picture, and the poem says grammar is not the carrots. The carrots could stand for words. Grammar is the gaps, the relations that keep each item distinct while still holding them in the same container. A glass is also transparent, so the spaces are visible. Grammar here is a structure you can see through instead of a rulebook.
The form seems to know this. There are two tercets, with a blank gap between them, so the poem's own layout is two separate units with a space in the middle. It is tempting to see the stanzas as the carrots and the white gap as the grammar. That may be more than the poem intends, but it rewards the look.
On the technical side, the poem has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and its meter is loose. The lines run between four and seven syllables, and the third line of the first stanza stretches out while the rest stay short. The strongest pattern is the parallel opening: "warmer would be" and "grammar would be" share a rhythm and a sentence frame, so we expect the two to match. Quieter sound links cross the gap as well. "Grammar" echoes the *gra-* of "gratuity," and the hard *c* of "complacent" returns in "carrots." These small repeats are a kind of grammar themselves, connections running through the space between.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it does what it says. It defines grammar through relation and gap, and it builds that argument from gaps: between question and answer, between stanzas, between a word and its expected role. For a student reader, it is a useful reminder that meaning often sits in the connections between words as much as in the words. The poem refuses to explain itself, and that refusal asks the reader to do the joining.