Stanzas 1-2

“Art Thou the Thing I Wanted” begins with the line “These unprepossessing sunsets.” The soft, sibilant s, constituting noteworthy consonance here, is used heavily throughout the poem. “Unprepossessing,” one of Fulton's many uncommon word choices, means “unattractive,” or “not noteworthy,” a perhaps unexpected descriptor for “sunsets.” Next come “aluminum-sided acres,” which, together with the sunsets, “retain us like problems / more interesting than solutions.” A restatement of these lines may be that worrying about and solving problems can sometimes be more fascinating than the actual solutions.

The second stanza continues the thought (and sentence) of the first stanza: the solutions are likened to “perfect / lots of condos,” where “lot” is used as a noun; modern condominiums, one should note, typically have outer shells of aluminum siding. Here, the reader realizes that the solutions are not simply “perfect,” as the last line of the first stanza might seem...