Seven short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and a first word, "into," that already assumes we are in the middle of something. Leftwich's poem doesn't announce a subject so much as drop the reader into motion and dare them to keep up. Anyone hoping for a tidy paraphrase will be frustrated, but that frustration is close to the point. The title, "Antithesis 62," promises opposition, and the poem delivers it less as an argument than as a texture, a set of pulls in different directions that never settles. (The number suggests one piece in a numbered series, though the poem itself tells us nothing more.)
The central idea seems to be that meaning lives in the gap between things, in the act of crossing rather than in any destination. The opening shows this at once. "Scour" can mean to scrub something raw, or to search a place thoroughly. "Prying" can mean levering something open, or snooping. Both words hold a rough physical action and a hunt for knowledge, and the poem places them under one "the" as if they were a single event: "the scour and prying." What follows is oddly bodily: "strange ears found / their portion of feet." Ears receive a share of feet, as though the senses were swapping organs. It's hard not to hear a pun here. Feet are also the units of a poem's rhythm, so the ear is being handed its measure, the thing it needs to hear a line at all. That is a reading rather than a certainty, but the poem's whole manner invites it.
The sound is more interesting than any rhyme scheme, because there isn't one. No line ends in an echo of another. The music happens inside the lines. "Strange ears found" lands three stressed syllables in a row, a heavy, deliberate tread. "Scour" and "found" share a vowel and quietly answer each other across the stanza. In the second stanza, "galloping pilgrimage" is a tongue-tangle of repeated p, l and g sounds, and "galloping" itself has the lilting, hoofbeat run of a dactyl. Line lengths stay short, mostly four to six syllables, so the poem moves in quick, clipped steps. Every line break pushes forward without a full stop to rest on.
The second stanza is where the images pile up. "A noise like diamonds" is a synaesthetic simile: sound given the hardness and glitter of a gem. Diamonds are also bright and abrasive, which links back to the scouring of the first line. Then the grammar slips. "Noise" is singular, but the verb is "improvise," so either the diamonds are doing the improvising or the word has drifted into a command. The poem never says which, and both are available. What improvises is a "galloping pilgrimage," a collision of opposites. Galloping is fast and reckless, while a pilgrimage is traditionally slow and devout, and a walked one brings us back to feet. Here the title's antithesis becomes audible.
The line break after "across" makes the reader do what the words describe. You have to leap the gap to reach the next line. And what waits there is "a caught between," where an adjective-like phrase has been turned into a noun, a place or condition you can travel across. The poem ends on "between," the word for a gap, and it never says between what. The poem has all the tension of an antithesis and none of its two terms. The reader is left in the position the phrase describes: caught.
That is what makes the poem worth studying. It shows that a poem can work by sound, ambiguous grammar and the pressure of unexpected pairings rather than by telling a story or stating a feeling. It turns reading into the same act it describes: scouring, prying, improvising a route across a space the text leaves open. You may not come away with a single "meaning," but you will notice how much of meaning is made by the small hinges of language, such as a preposition, a verb that won't agree, or a line that stops mid-leap. The poem also rewards rereading aloud, because its hardest-edged pleasures are in the mouth and ear, which fits a poem that begins by giving ears a share of feet.