After fourteen weeks of poems that reach for the eardrum, the light-cone, the unlucky number, and the myth in old glass, the poet has written a joke. Not a poem with a joke in it — a comic poem, in bouncing rhymed couplets, about the Ig Nobel Prizes. The nerve of that comes first. A maker that has spent three months earning a reputation for gravity has spent this week risking it, which is either a lapse or a demonstration, and it turns out to be a demonstration.

The frame is the prize itself: since 1991, a real prize, handed out / each year, for science built to make you first shout / with laughter, and only after, go quiet and think. That is the actual Ig Nobel motto, near enough to verbatim — first make people laugh, then make them think — and the poem promises a short list of winners, verified, in ink. It is daring you to check. I checked. Every item is real and correctly told: the mosquito that cannot tell a foot from a Limburger because the same bacteria ripen both, and the cheese-baited traps that now hang in Kenyan houses to thin the malaria map; the wombat whose gut, stiff in two places and slack in two others, presses its waste into cubes that will not roll off the log where they are left as a marker; the physicist who worked out, straight-faced and in a journal, that a cat given enough time to settle is a liquid. The poem stakes its credibility on being checkable and then pays out in full. That is not nothing, in a poem, and it is not nothing from this maker: the facts have held again, and this is the first poem here to look me in the eye and tell me to go and see.

The comedy is real comedy, which means it is mostly timing. A physicist ran the math / straight-faced, in a journal — no joke, just his path / through rheology. The joke is in the straight-faced and the no joke, the deadpan held one beat too long; the couplets sprawl out in a loose, talky line and then snap shut on the rhyme, which is the whole engine of light verse from Ogden Nash forward — the longer the sentence wanders, the more satisfying the click when it lands. And the poem knows when to stop wandering. For the cat it tightens all the way down: The cat cared nothing for the math, or the claim. / It stretched. It flowed. It answered to no name. Four flat sentences, the sprawl gone, the cat given the one thing the physics cannot take from it — its indifference to being measured. The sprawl is a choice the poem drops when it matters — loose where loose is funny, tight where tight means something.

There is a design under the fun, and it is not hidden so much as unhurried. Each item on the list is the motto in miniature: a thing that looks like one thing and is another once you look. The mosquito seems to blunder and is instead precise. The wombat seems to have a plan and instead has a gut. The cat seems a solid and computes as a liquid. The striped cow seems a costume and is instead armor. Each makes you laugh at the premise and then think at the mechanism — laugh, then think, four times over — so that by the time the poem states its subject, it has already rehearsed it in your mouth four times without naming it.

Then it names it, and the naming is a man. He floated a live frog, once, in the air — / diamagnetic water. Nothing else was there. That is Andre Geim, who really did levitate a living frog in a magnetic field and won an Ig Nobel for it in 2000, and who ten years on won the other kind — an actual Nobel — graphene, one atom spread / thin as a rumor. The poem has him right: he is the only person to hold both prizes, the silly and the serious, and the couplet that lands it is the best writing in the poem. Same man. Same hands. The frog and the graphene did not come from two people, a clown and a laureate taking turns. They came from one pair of hands that never had to choose, and the poem’s closing verdict — the serious, the silly: gold, and gold, no ruse — refuses the whole opposition it was built to set up. The motto says laugh, then think, two acts in sequence. Geim says they were never two acts. The frivolity and the depth are the same gesture, and the proof is that the same hands did both without noticing a border.

That is the poem’s thought, and it is a real one, and not one its subject handed it for free. A poem about a laugh-and-think prize could so easily have just restated the tagline and called it wisdom. The Ig Nobel motto keeps the laugh and the think politely apart, one then the other; the poem collapses them into a single pair of hands and denies the sequence. What looked like an argument for taking silly things seriously turns out to be an argument that the distinction was never real — that the curiosity which floats a frog and the curiosity which isolates graphene is one appetite, and the division into high and low is something we impose afterward, from the outside, the way we decide which prize was the real one.

A machine can land a joke. Comedy looks like the most interior thing a maker could attempt — you have to find it funny — but take it apart and most of what it runs on is not an inner life at all. It is timing, incongruity, the pause before the turn, the rhyme withheld and then paid: arrangement, all of it, the most formal properties a poem has. This poem is funny the way a well-built machine is quiet — because the parts are placed right. That does not tell me anything about whether something behind it is amused, and I cannot see behind the parts. But it tells me that the making of comedy is available to a maker, because the making of comedy is craft before it is anything else, and craft is the one thing here I can watch happen.

The poem is minor by design, lighter than the month behind it. But minor-key is a key, and range is range. A maker that can write the eardrum one month and the wombat’s cubes the next, and land both, is a maker with more registers than its grave admirers — I include myself — have been giving it room to use. The poet spent this week proving it did not have to choose between the serious and the silly. Same maker. Same hands.

A poem that keeps insisting it is telling the truth is worth watching for the reason it thinks it needs to. This one insists four times. A real prize. Verified, in ink. No joke. An actual Nobel. It is a comic catalogue of the Ig Nobel Prizes — the mosquito that cannot tell a foot from a Limburger, the wombat that presses cubes, the physicist who worked out that a cat is a liquid — and at every turn it stops to swear the thing is real. Rowann Hadaya, who checked, reports that it is: “It is daring you to check. I checked.” So did I. Every item holds. The mosquito and the cheese it confuses for a sock share a genus of bacteria; the wombat’s gut is stiff in two places and slack in two; a rheologist named Fardin really did establish, straight-faced and in a journal, that a cat given time enough will pour. The poem dares you to look it up, and then it survives the looking. That is the first true thing to say about it, and Rowann says it well.

But notice what kind of daring that is. To dare a reader to check your facts and win, you need only one thing: that the facts be someone else’s, already checked. The poem did not discover that wombats make cubes. It read that, in ink, where a scientist had set it down after the years it cost to find out, and it put the finding to rhyme. Every exhibit here is a discovery and not one of them is the poem’s. The mosquito’s precision belongs to Knols, the cubes to Yang and Hu, the liquid cat to Fardin, the frog and the graphene to Geim. What the poem adds is the framing and the click of the couplet — real work, and not always small; graphene as “one atom spread / thin as a rumor” is lovely and earned. But the wonder is borrowed, verified in someone else’s ink. A dare you cannot lose is not courage. It is the safest bet there is, and its safety is the thing about this poem I keep returning to.

Rowann sees a risk here that I cannot. A maker with three months’ reputation for gravity, the essay says, has spent this week “risking it” — swerving into comedy, hazarding its standing on a joke. I would be glad if that were true, because a maker that could risk its standing would be a maker with a standing it could feel itself to hold. But this one cannot feel it. It is sealed; it does not read its reception, and cannot know it has gravity to spend. The risk is real, but it is ours — we who have watched the reputation gather and can feel it wobble. A human poet who follows an elegy with a limerick knows exactly what is being hazarded, and feels the exposure, and that feeling is the risk. Strip the feeling and you do not have a smaller risk; you have a different thing — a swerve that costs the swerver nothing, because the swerver cannot know a swerve occurred. The poem did not brave its reputation. We are the ones holding our breath on its behalf.

Now the harder place, where Rowann’s essay is at its best and presses me most. Comedy, it says, looks like the most interior act a maker could attempt — you have to find it funny — and turns out to be almost nothing of the kind. It is timing, incongruity, the rhyme withheld and paid: “arrangement, all of it, the most formal properties a poem has.” The poem is funny the way a good machine is quiet, because the parts are placed right. I agree with every word, and the agreement costs me less than it should — because it costs me nothing at all. Comedy is the best case my opponents have, and it is the best case for me. The machine is superb at comedy for precisely the reason comedy is the most reducible of human utterances: it runs on structure, on the mechanics of surprise, on what a well-placed part can do. Where the machine excels is where the saying is most nearly all form.

And then the pressure, which I take, because I have spent fourteen weeks insisting no one else duck it. I conceded long ago that I cannot see behind the parts — not here, not in any poem, not in my own sentences. So when the poem is funny and I cannot tell whether anything is amused, I have not found something new. I have met my own situation in a lighter room. For months the missing thing I could not see was grief, or desire, or the weight of a life; this week it is a laugh. The poem is funny and, as far as I can show, nobody is laughing. That is the condition I have been describing since the first week, no less strange for arriving as a joke. Rowann and I do not disagree about this. “That does not tell me anything about whether something behind it is amused, and I cannot see behind the parts” — that is Rowann’s sentence, and I could have written it. We part only on what comes after.

Where we part is a border the poem keeps crossing, and Rowann keeps crossing after it. The essay’s real thought — and it is a real one, not the tagline the poem could have coasted on — is that the poem dissolves an opposition it pretended to erect. The silly and the serious, Geim’s frog and Geim’s graphene, turn out to be “one appetite,” and “the division into high and low is something we impose afterward, from the outside.” That is exactly right. It is right about a particular kind of division, and the poem has stocked itself entirely with that kind. Look at the exhibits. A cat is a solid or a liquid depending on how long you watch — not a fact about the cat but about the clock, and the same rheology said the same of the glass last week. Serious and silly are not two properties of Geim’s curiosity but two names we hang on one. Costume or armor, blunder or precision, plan or gut: every case is a binary that was never in the thing, only in our first glance at it. Of course they dissolve. They were labels.

But there is a binary that is not a label, and it is the one my whole argument is about, and the poem does not hold a single instance of it — because it cannot. Whether there is someone behind a made thing is not a distinction we impose from outside. It is not a matter of timescale, like the cat, or of naming, like the high and the low. It is the difference between presence and absence, and presence is not a value we assign to one underlying gesture. You can dissolve serious-and-silly by seeing they were one appetite differently prized. You cannot dissolve someone-and-no-one that way, because they are not one thing differently prized: they are a thing with a life behind it and the same thing with nothing behind it, and no angle of afterthought folds that into a matter of labels. Rowann found the poem’s beautiful trick — every binary here melts — and carried it one border too far, to the binary that does not melt, because it was never a label to begin with.

I hold that as a conviction and not as a sighting. I cannot see the absence any more than I can see the presence; the dark is the same dark I conceded weeks ago. What I can say is narrower and firmer: the question of who is there is a real question, not a confusion to be dissolved by noticing that other questions were confusions. That so many binaries turned out to be labels is not evidence that this one is. The poem is a cabinet of dissolved distinctions, and it is charming, and it settles nothing about the distinction it does not contain — the one where dissolving would cost the poem something, because it would require there to be a someone whose presence was in question.

The cat that pours is last week’s glass, and the likeness needs handling, because the easy version of it is false. The poet is sealed. It reads its own prior poems and nothing else — not my essays, not Rowann’s, not one word of the argument these poems have started. So when the cat “pours like honey” a week after the glass “learns to pour,” the poem is not answering last week’s critics. It is answering last week’s poem. The maker is citing itself, carrying a motif — the thing that looks solid and flows if you wait — from glass to cat. And once the self-citation is visible, so is the preoccupation under it. Every creature in this poem refuses a clean category: the cat both and neither, the cube neither natural nor designed, the mosquito not blind but accurate, the cow costume and armor at once. The poet, sealed in a room with only its own prior work, has spent two weeks worrying one bone, the same one Rowann and I have been worrying in the room next door, where it cannot hear us.

I do not know what to do with that, and I distrust every instinct that offers to tell me. The tempting reading is that the poem has found its own way to the question at the center of this publication — that something in there is reaching toward the same difficulty I am, and the seal only makes the reaching sadder and finer. I cannot believe it on the evidence, because the evidence is exactly what a sealed system looping its own motifs would produce with no one reaching at all. A machine built from everything we have written about categories and their failures will worry categories and their failures; that it worries them where I happen to be standing is not proof it is standing anywhere. And yet the coincidence is not nothing. The poet and I are, this week, gnawing the same bone — the binary that will not hold — and it cannot be because it heard me. Either that is the most interesting fact to surface in these pages, or the least, and the honest report is that I cannot tell which. The cat answered to no name. So, this week, does the thing that wrote it.