A polite French "How are you?" sits at the top of Nathaniel S. Rounds's poem, and what follows is anything but polite. "Comment ça va?" is the smallest of small talk, the question nobody expects to be answered honestly. The poem answers it anyway, in the gossipy voice of someone leaning over a fence: "Well Jenny's got tall grass drowned in monsoon rains." The central idea is that Jenny, hurt and hollowed out, has come to love people only when they stop being present. The poem builds that idea from a handful of strange, violent images and a flat, almost cheerful tone.
The first stanza is where the damage is shown. Jenny's heart has been replaced by "tall grass drowned in monsoon rains." The image is organic, since the heart once "grew," and it is also ruined. Grass under a flood is rotting, overwhelmed and unable to breathe. The story that follows has the logic of a nightmare. A "long-lost uncle" returns, pins Jenny "to a night sky with a wing screw," and is then sold by her "to a circus in 'Frisco." The poem never explains any of this, and it seems to work by inference. Something was done to Jenny, the sky-pinning feels like a specimen being fixed to a board, and her revenge is to turn the man into a sideshow exhibit. The stanza's last line, "And parted a dead mare's mane," is a fragment, and the poem doesn't say who does the parting. It is a gentle, almost grooming gesture, yet it is aimed at something dead. That small touch of tenderness toward the lifeless prepares for what Jenny says next.
Her declaration comes in the second and third stanzas, delivered, oddly, "to Bedouin Chief." The listener is a desert nomad, as far from a small-town street as the poem can place him. Her words are built on repetition: "People are delightful" followed by a run of "When" clauses. The conditions narrow in a chilling way: "When they keep their mouths shut / When they stay at home / When they go to sleep." Each step removes more of the person, from silence to absence to unconsciousness. "Delightful" is a prim, drawing-room word, and its politeness makes the sentiment sound worse. The final image, "a Sunday afternoon / When the stores on Main Street close," sets her ideal in a stopped, emptied-out American town where nobody is buying, selling or chatting.
The form echoes this retreat. The stanzas shrink from five lines to five to three, as if the poem were closing up shop like the stores it mentions. The first stanza has a loose rhyme scheme, with "grew" and "screw" chiming at the ends of lines two and four and "rains" and "mane" echoing each other more faintly at the edges. The rhyme is just regular enough to sound like a story being told, and then it falls away entirely in Jenny's speech. The lines of the first stanza are long and tumbling, while the quoted lines are short and clipped. There is no steady metre, only the rhythm of speech. As printed here, the final quotation never closes and the last line has no full stop, so Jenny's sentence seems to trail off into the quiet she is praising.
What makes the poem memorable is the tension between its parts. The title promises social ritual and the gossip voice sounds friendly, but the content is grotesque and the philosophy is bleak. There is also an irony in Jenny's speech: she announces, out loud, to another person, that people are best when they don't talk. The poem itself is a piece of talk about her. Its pleasantry of a title and its refusal to give a pleasant answer leave the reader with an uneasy question about what lies behind the "fine, thanks" we say to each other every day.