Nathaniel S. Rounds begins with a small comic fantasy: a traveler reaches the Saint Stephen/Calais border and meets the customs inspector not with an excuse but with a confession of intent. He has bags of seed packets and plans to sow them "on Canadian soil." Customs officers are paid to ask what you are carrying, and the speaker answers with beets, peppers, squash and tomatoes. He imagines the official, "if the guy is not a machine," answering in kind, naming his own rhubarb and chard, shaking hands, swapping addresses and trading old sweet corn packets. The poem's first idea is that gardening is a language people share across boundaries, and that a shared passion can turn a checkpoint into a conversation.
The seed names carry much of the charm. "Detroit Dark Red Beets," "Sweet California Wonder Orange Peppers" and "Early Prolific Straightneck Summer Squash" read like a catalogue, and the poem lets them run as long, slow lines with no commentary. Several already contain places, so the vegetables seem to have crossed the continent before the speaker does. The "odd-named / Mortgage Lifter Tomatoes" bring in a note of money and hope. The title promises "Everything (and Everyone)," and the parenthesis is a quiet hint that the poem will widen from plants to people.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines are short and conversational, with every line beginning with a capital. The isolated word "With" gets a line to itself, which works like a drumroll before the list of packets. Enjambment makes the speaker stumble pleasantly: "exchange mailing / Addresses" splits an ordinary phrase, and the handshake scene sounds like something said out loud. The tense is future and conditional ("I will greet," "he will tell me," "we might even shake hands"), so the whole border scene is a hope, not an event.
Then the poem turns. "I silently acknowledge that at this hour" shifts us to the present tense and to a different place, a patch "skirting Daytona Beach," at the corner where "South Beach Street / Meets Bellevue Avenue." The generous, orderly world of seed trades gives way to a bar scene: "Bob is rushing Otis out of Ed Walden's Bar / With the rooster on the two bit pool table." The poem never explains the rooster or why Otis is being hurried out. It is a barnyard animal in a bar, a stray piece of country life in a rough place, and the strangeness leaves the scene unresolved. The word "silently" suggests the speaker keeps this knowledge to himself, even in the middle of his friendly daydream.
The last three lines make the connection that the title's parenthesis was preparing. Seed language returns, now applied to people: "those not sown on fine soil / Aspire to ride bikes out of town / As far as they can go." Everything earlier in the poem assumed good soil, where a packet of seeds becomes a row of vegetables and a stranger becomes a friend. These people had no such start, and their idea of growth is escape. The bicycle is a modest vehicle, and "as far as they can go" admits a limit. The poem doesn't say how far that is, or whether it is far enough.
What gives the poem its force is the contrast between those two scenes. A poem that stopped at the border would be a pleasant, slightly eccentric celebration of gardeners. By setting a bar, a rooster and a hurried exit against it, Rounds shows that the same metaphor of planting, soil and growth that makes the first half warm also makes the second half sobering. Seeds can be mailed anywhere, but people can't always be moved to richer ground. The speaker's "silent acknowledgement" is a small act of attention, a way of keeping the people in Ed Walden's Bar in mind while he imagines his own good fortune. For a short poem made of vegetable names and street corners, it asks a large and fair question about who gets planted well and who has to ride away.