A man puts on a dog costume, rides his motorcycle to the vet, shows his food stamps at the desk, and gets himself neutered. Told with a wink, that would be a joke. In Nathaniel S. Rounds's "Two-Stroke Sonata" it is delivered so flatly that it turns into a portrait of loneliness, and a sharp comment on what a system will and won't offer a poor, solitary person.
Mr. Remora is built almost entirely from specific, secondhand objects. He rides a rusty '66 Sears Allstate 250, plays "sentimental waltzes on homemade acetate," and lives in a cabin of freight pallets roofed with "metal sheets from a local newspaper." The detail suggests printing plates, so the news literally becomes his shelter. Everything he owns has been repurposed or made by hand. A waltz is a dance for two, yet he listens to his alone. His name seems chosen with care too. A remora is a fish that clings to larger creatures and lives off their leavings. Mr. Remora, who lives on the margins of other people's economy, fits that image. The poem never says so, but the name hints at a man who survives by attaching himself to whatever passes by.
The vet scene is where the deadpan does its work. The language swings between official and absurd. The "Department of Agriculture, Markets and Food" is "subsidizing low-income earners to neuter pets," and Mr. Remora responds with a "strategically altered dog costume," a phrase that treats a costume like a military plan. The line breaks add to the comedy: "presented food stamps as proof" hangs alone, then "of eligibility" arrives like a stamp on a form. The final clause, "was promptly sterilized," is passive and efficient. Mr. Remora does the planning and then disappears as the grammatical subject, as if the system simply processed him. The poem also notes that he "had no children," so the operation changes nothing in practice. It only makes his solitude official. Whether that reads as protest, desperation, or a strange act of self-determination is left open, and the poem is better for not choosing.
Between these anecdotes come three short fragments about a tree, written in a very different voice. They are slow, painterly and Latinate: "veridian dyed cloth," "circumambient flora." The first, a "skeletal neck" wrapped in cloth, could describe a tree, a person, or an animal in a collar, and it quietly anticipates the costume. In the second, a "dead tree / borrows leaves," which is exactly what Mr. Remora does when he borrows a dog's identity to get something he needs. By the third, the tree has become a drawing: "gray ink" streaked over a "watercolor wash / of green." The word "over" is left stranded at the end of its stanza, so the gray line hangs for a moment before meeting the green. A single gray mark against a living background is a fitting picture of a lonely man, and the line "Lonely tree" says as much.
The title ties these two registers together. A two-stroke is the kind of engine that powers his motorcycle, but "stroke" is also what a brush or pen makes, and a sonata is a piece built from contrasting sections. The poem is arranged the same way, alternating the brisk prose of the anecdote with the stillness of the tree images. There is no rhyme and no steady meter. The long, prose-like lines break on small words ("a," "was," "is"), which gives them a slightly sputtering rhythm, like an engine that doesn't quite run smoothly.
The poem is worth reading because it holds comedy and sadness in the same hand without explaining either. It never pities Mr. Remora, and it never lets us laugh at him comfortably. The tree fragments suggest that borrowing, disguising and making do is part of how living things survive, and that survival is often quiet and lonely.