Level ground is the first thing Jim Leftwich's "Antithesis 63" takes away. Its opening line announces that "the days are diagonal here," and from then on nothing quite sits straight. Time, which we usually picture as a flat line of tomorrows and yesterdays, has been tipped onto a slope. The place called "here" is never named, so the reader has to work out what kind of world has slanting days.
The poem is five short lines in lowercase, with no punctuation and no capital letters. That bareness matters. Without full stops or commas, the syntax is left open and phrases can attach in more than one direction. Take "bats a ghost ago." "Bats" might be the flying animals, or it might be a verb, as in swinging at something. "A ghost ago" borrows the shape of "a minute ago" or "an age ago" but swaps the unit of time for something unreal, so the past is measured in hauntings. Because "ago" runs straight into "invent," the line break gives the reader a small jolt. We can hear "ago" as the end of one thought or the start of a command.
The imagery pulls in opposite directions, which suits a poem titled "Antithesis." The diagonal runs "from the goalpost to the dagger," from a sport to a weapon, a target to a wound. A dagger is also a printer's mark, the † used for footnotes, so the line may be hinting at a path from play to writing. That is an inference from the word, not something the poem says. The same pairing shows up elsewhere: ghosts and bats, the dead and the living, a horizon that is supposed to be level but is "slant." The number in the title suggests one entry in a larger sequence, though the poem gives no further detail.
The most interesting move is the imperative in line four, "invent the slant horizon." A horizon feels like the most fixed thing in a landscape, the line everything else is measured against. The poem treats it as something to be made up, and a slanted one at that. This is the poem's central idea. The world we see is partly a construction, and language is one of the tools that builds it. The diagonal days from line one now look less like a fact than like something the poem has just created.
The sound patterns do much of the structural work, since there is no rhyme in the usual sense. Hard g's knock through the first three lines: "diagonal," "goalpost," "dagger," "ghost," "ago." The "go" sound in "goalpost" comes back in "ghost" and "ago," which links the lines at the level of the mouth rather than the plot. Then the b's take over in "bats," "bees," and "buzz." The rhythm shifts too. The first two lines run to eight syllables each and feel almost steady, "from the GOALpost to the DAGger" nearly marching. The lines then shrink to five, seven and six syllables, as if the poem is losing its footing, which fits the slanting ground.
The last line, "the bees are in the buzz," closes the frame by echoing the grammar of the first: "the days are diagonal," "the bees are in the buzz." Both are plural subjects followed by "are." But the second reverses the logic we expect. Normally the buzz comes from the bees. Here the bees are inside the sound, as though the noise is the larger thing and the creatures are its contents. A thing has been swallowed by its own description. The poem ends in the same upside-down way it began, with sound and language going first and the objects following.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It does not offer a message to be extracted and summarised. It shows a mind making connections by sound, by double meaning and by the pull between opposites, and it asks the reader to do the same. A poem like this changes what reading is for. Instead of asking "what does this mean?", we start asking "how does this make meaning happen?" The answer, in five lines, is that a slanted horizon can be invented, and that a reader who accepts the tilt will find the poem hums with its own buzz.