Someone carves a secret room into a doorknob, and the rest of that life seems to shrink around it. That is the quiet joke and the quiet sorrow of Nathaniel S. Rounds's poem, which speaks to a "you" and tells his story in a handful of deadpan snapshots. I know nothing reliable about Rounds beyond the page, so everything below rests on the text itself. (The version I was given has a few garbled spots, such as "puUed" and "Tl^ Guide." I have read them as "pulled" and "TV Guide," and "tom" as "torn.")
The first stanza has the breeziest energy. "Got cracking" and "Shazam!" sound like a boy's adventure story, and the Swiss army knife adds to it. The discovery is a "secret plastic hideaway," and what goes inside is touchingly small: a high school ring, torn ride tickets, a magazine picture of a starlet. These are souvenirs of almost-events, a past kept in a place no one would look. The starlet is "unreachable, albeit / A faithful confidante," a nicely contradictory phrase. Because she is only a picture, she can never answer back, and that is exactly why she can be trusted with everything.
Then the tone flattens. The second stanza is a run of short declarative sentences: a correspondence course in accounting, a job in a "big box bizarre," a vow to bathe twice daily. "Bizarre" may be a slip for "bazaar," or it may be a pun, since a megastore is both a market and a strange place. Either way, the mismatch between "unshakeable oath" and something as ordinary as bathing is where the humor lives. Rounds treats a minor act of self-improvement as a knight's vow. The stanza ends on its saddest line: "You've poured all your savings into oatmeal creme pies." The verb "poured" makes a snack sound like a flood, and the pies are cheap comfort bought with the money a more ambitious life would have saved.
The last stanza is the most daring. It opens with a fragment, "That starlet-sans-name," where the French "sans" lends a faint glamour to someone who is really just an anonymous face from a TV listing. Then the line breaks on "She's," as if the speaker hesitates over what she has become. The answer is a "rosette button / On your trailer ceiling tile," which suggests she has shrunk into a pattern on the ceiling a person stares at while lying in bed. The poem's last image is stranger still: a "funny mirror seamstress" who is "Sewing up the ramparts / Of your heart." Ramparts are defensive walls, and you cannot sew stone. The image is tender and impossible at once. It could mean mending, or it could mean sealing the heart shut. Like the doorknob, the heart is a hidden compartment with a hard exterior, and the funny mirror suggests the picture of comfort has been distorted into something he now only half recognizes.
The form supports this ambiguity. The poem is free verse with no rhyme scheme, and it moves from a ten-line stanza to a four-line one to an eight-line one. The lines are short and often break on small connecting words ("of," "a," "albeit"), which gives the voice a slightly hesitant, stumbling rhythm. Every line begins with a capital, even mid-sentence ("Tickets," "A faithful confidante"), which makes the page look more formal than the slangy voice sounds. The title seems to play on "Labanotation," a system for writing dance movement down on paper, and on "annotation." That is my reading of the title, not something the poem states. If it is right, the poem is a notation of a life's small, repetitive steps, danced on a cheap surface.
What makes the poem worth reading is its balance. It could easily mock its subject, with the pies, the trailer, and the mail-order career all easy targets. But the ending refuses pure ridicule. By giving a private fantasy the dignity of a defended fortress, the poem lets us laugh and then feel a little ashamed of laughing.