"Eyes go thinly" is a strange way to begin, and the strangeness is deliberate. "Thinly" is an adverb attached to a verb that doesn't normally want one, so the line makes us hesitate over how eyes can "go" at all. Narrowing, weakening and wearing out all seem possible, and the next line, "of time and the coming," doesn't settle it. Grammar slips out from under the reader. What arrives is a sense of pressure: "light backing up on us," like water in a blocked pipe or traffic in a jam. Morning here is not a promise. It is something piling up against us, while circumstance can only "crawl."
The poem's central scene is surprisingly physical. People everywhere are "displacing air as if / belonging to them." Anyone who moves through a crowd pushes air aside, and each person acts as though the space were theirs by right. The speaker doesn't stand outside this and judge. "And I" gets a short line to itself, and then the same phrase returns: "displacing air as if / belonging to me." Only the pronoun changes. The accusation turns inward, and the poem quietly admits that the arrogance it notices in others is also its own. "Belonging" is slightly slippery, too. Does the air belong to us, or do we belong to it? The poem lets both readings stand.
Right after this neat pairing comes the poem's own verdict on it: "outrageous dream of / symmetry / crack." The mirrored lines were the symmetry, and the slash, with the blunt word "crack" behind it, splits the idea open on the page. The poem doesn't just describe the fantasy that everyone's claim is equal and balanced. It builds the fantasy and breaks it in front of us.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the poem is one unbroken block in lowercase, with colons and slashes where we might expect full stops. Only two real full stops appear, after "me" and at the very end. Lines tend to end on small hinge words such as "and," "we," "our," and "as if," so the reader keeps tipping forward into the next line, a little off balance. The sound of the language adds to this. Hard *c* sounds cluster in "crawl," "circumstance," "crack," and "crumbling," giving the middle of the poem a brittle, splintering texture. Against that, the long, soft words "displacing" and "belonging" feel smooth and self-assured, which is exactly the assurance the poem is undermining.
The final movement turns to the body. "Close to the place / where vision stands" sounds like an edge of understanding, and what stands there is "the walk / the run / of signs, crumbling habit." My reading is that the signs we live by, the routines we follow without thinking, are speeding past and falling apart. The people then drop "on our knees," "bent out of shape." Kneeling can suggest prayer or defeat, and the poem doesn't choose. When "we / lift our heads," the gesture that should feel like hope ends with "our / necks snap." Even looking up costs something.
The last image is the most surprising: "our / bodies washed / in the moon's curve." Everything before it was about breakage, crowding, and harsh coming light. Now there is a cool, rounded shape, and "washed" suggests cleansing. Set against the cracked symmetry, the moon's curve looks like a different kind of order, one nobody has to claim or defend. The poem doesn't say whether this rescues us or only comforts us, and that restraint seems right.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it explains and how much it makes us feel. It takes an ordinary sensation, being one body among many bodies, and shows how thin our sense of ownership really is. Its broken syntax, its slashes, and its snapping necks make the reader experience that thinness directly. It also refuses the easy move of blaming "them." The "I" is in the crowd, breathing the same displaced air.