Most poems about excellence look upward, toward summits, cathedrals, great men. Thomas McAfee's "There Are Peripheries . . ." looks sideways and outward, to the edges, and makes a quiet argument that significance isn't reserved for the center. The poem surveys three kinds of ordinary life: a small town too modest to attract bank robbers, women who have never entertained royalty, and teenage lovers fumbling in parked cars. Its claim is that each of these has its own power, its own mystery, its own flash of intensity, even if none of them would ever make the news.
The opening line sets the terms. "Peripheries of excellence" is a slightly odd, abstract phrase, and the poem spends its twelve lines giving it flesh. The small town is defined by negatives: robbers "never chance / A bank," and "no buildings tower / Breathlessly out of the street." That adverb is delightful. Skyscrapers don't just rise; they rise breathlessly, as if the big city were always out of puff from its own ambition. Then comes the pivot, blunt and short: "Yet there is power." The poem seems to concede a point about small places and then, within the same line, take it back. The sentence stops abruptly, as though the speaker refuses to apologize.
The second image is the subtlest. The ladies "who have not had princes to tea" have "lived completely out of mystery," meaning they have been cut off from glamour and romance, the stuff of fairy tales. And yet "they are mysterious as they declare / Their views on table manners, babies, war." The list rewards a second look. Table manners and babies are small and domestic; war is vast. By setting them side by side in the same confident tone, the poem suggests that these women hold opinions about the whole range of human life with equal conviction. The mystery isn't in what they say but in the sheer force of their certainty, and in the fact that we can never fully know what lies behind it.
The third image is the most daring, and it is where the poem's attitude becomes clear. The lovers "bounding on back seats of cars" are called "Crude, unlovely," and their conversation is "clichés about stars." McAfee doesn't flatter them. He admits they are clumsy and unoriginal, which makes his next move more striking: "These, too, know heightened minutes." The little word "too" matters. It insists that this crude, cliché-ridden scene belongs in the same company as the town's quiet power and the ladies' mystery. The poem's final line captures the moment of release, "just before / The muscles ease," and then gives the lovers a restless, wondering question: "What else? What more?" That question can be read two ways. It might be satisfaction, or it might be an ache for something beyond the moment. The poem leaves the ambiguity open, and it is the right choice.
Formally, the poem is built from rhymed couplets, with a pleasing slant in some of them. "Chance" is paired with itself only loosely against "tower" and "power," while "tea" meets "mystery," "declare" meets "war," and "cars" meets "stars." The rhymes are mostly clean, and their neatness adds a gentle irony. A poem about modest, unpolished lives is itself tidy and controlled. The lines run in a loose, conversational rhythm that never quite settles into strict meter, which suits the speaking voice, wry and slightly amused, that carries the whole thing.
What makes the poem worth reading is its generosity. It would be easy to mock small towns, tea-table opinions, and teenage fumbling. McAfee notices instead that intensity doesn't depend on grandeur. The "heightened minutes" belong to everyone, including those the world overlooks. The poem's final question, "What else? What more?", is really the question all of us ask, wherever we live.