Nathaniel S. Rounds's poem begins like a craft project and ends like a secret handshake. A speaker paints an angry squirrel on pastry cloth, stretches it over a tepee frame, and sets a telescope on top. Then comes the real business: honey and strawberry sandwiches, a legal notebook of observations, and a plan for the whole thing to be discovered someday. On the surface it is about two neighbours watching the sky. Underneath, it is about what to do with a grudge. The central idea is that you can answer a person's meanness by making room for her, even if you do it in your own odd, imaginative way.
The poem hides its turn in plain sight. We meet the angry squirrel early, as a painted portrait, and assume it is just a whimsical choice. Only halfway through do we learn that "Marge the checkout lady" is the squirrel, because she turns "nasty" whenever Anne and the speaker arrive with coupons. The line "So that's why we turned her into a mascot" works backwards, so that the opening image suddenly means something different. The portrait is a way of keeping her close, the way people hang up a picture of someone they are trying to understand.
Structurally the poem refuses the usual tools of verse. It has no rhyme and no regular rhythm, and its lines follow the pace of speech. Many begin with "And," "Which," or "So," so that the sentences seem to tumble forward, each thought hooking onto the last. That gives the voice a breathless, storytelling quality, and the judging by the logic ("So that's why") suggests a mind that explains things in its own way. The line lengths shift to match. "And follow the stars" is short and quiet, while the sofa sentence stretches over several lines, piling up its details of the kid, the parents, the twenty-eight dollars, and the hole in the back. Colloquial phrases like "all nasty and everything" keep the tone casual and unpolished.
The imagery is a collision of the grand and the humble. We get an "aurora sky station," "astronomical coordinates," and "infamy," set against pastry cloth, crayon, coupons, and a secondhand sofa. The word "infamy" is wonderful. The speaker probably means fame, but infamy has a slightly outlaw ring, and it fits two neighbours with a secret observatory. The sofa matters too. It is cheap and flawed, bought "on account of the hole in the back," and it is exactly where the notebook will wait to be found. Valuable things turn up in damaged places, and that is just what the speakers hope will happen with Marge.
The repeated phrase "angry squirrel" changes meaning as the poem goes on. It begins as a painting, becomes a private insult, then a mascot, and finally a job title: "Director of Warmth." The speakers borrow the language of offices and institutions (a "legal notebook," a "secret ID," a "Director") and use it for kindness. Official language is usually what keeps people at a distance, as at a checkout counter, but here it is how they decide someone belongs. Their wish to make her "something that fits in somehow" also hints that the speakers know what it is like not to fit.
The ending is both funny and touching. The code 567903ASDW, which is also the poem's title, is written "on my tube socks with a laundry marker so I won't forget." It is a deflating, practical detail, yet it shows how seriously the speaker takes the plan, since the name is kept on his own body. The poem never says whether Marge will accept the invitation, and it gives her anger room by writing "someday when she isn't angry." The hope is patient rather than naive.
What makes the poem significant is its balance. It could have been bitter about rude customers, or sentimental about a sudden friendship. Instead it stays in the territory of play, and through play it quietly does something generous. Resentment is not denied but rewritten, with the speakers inventing a story in which the person who irritates them gets a warm mug and an important title.