Michael Heller's poem begins with a sentence that seems to have lost its first half: "Not ever to let it be". What is "it"? The poem never says, and that is deliberate. It sounds like a resolution, perhaps never to let a moment of understanding simply lapse, but the next line turns away from argument and offers a picture: "i think of silverfish / skittering across a pond." The word usually names a small insect, but here it also suggests something silvery and quick, glinting over water. What matters is what happens next. The creatures make "ripples", yet the "sky and trees" are "not disturbed". The surface is busy, and the reflection holds.
That image carries the poem's central idea. The mind, it suggests, can mirror the world the way a pond mirrors its surroundings, and small disturbances don't have to shatter the picture. Then the poem moves from landscape to people: "as when it struck you / it struck me." The repeated "struck" makes the insight sound sudden, almost physical, and the shared verb suggests two people arriving at the same realization. Judging by the title and the pronouns, the poem is addressed to someone close to the speaker, though the text alone doesn't tell us more than that.
The most interesting move comes in the second stanza, where the poem is careful about what this realization is not. It is "a way out of unhappiness", but "not happy / as one might say: I'm / so happy." The line break splits the exclamation in two, so "I'm" hangs at the end of a line like a small boast before "so happy" arrives. Happiness in that everyday sense is a surface thing, a bright skittering. What the poem wants instead is "a depth / to hold / the various possibilities." Here the pond image pays off. Insects move across the top, but a pond has depth beneath, and only depth can contain reflections. The line break after "to hold" also lets the phrase do what it says, since the line pauses and holds before the thing being held is named.
Those "possibilities" are made concrete in the plainest way: "your face, mine". Anyone who has looked into still water knows that faces appear in it. The poem's final image is therefore both a metaphor and a literal reflection: two people, side by side, held in the same calm surface. The isolated word "there" then seems to point at something, as though the speaker were gesturing at the water.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short and uneven, and white space surrounds them the way open water surrounds the insects. Punctuation is sparse until the colon and the full stop in "so happy.", which makes that bit of conventional cheerfulness feel slightly stiff beside the loose, quiet lines around it. Even the lowercase "i" in the opening seems modest and unassertive, set against the capital "I'm" of the imagined exclamation. The poem does not shout its feelings, and it hints that the louder kind of happiness may be the shallower kind.
The ending is the subtlest sound effect: "tendered, tended." The two words are nearly the same, one contained inside the other. To tender something is to offer it, and to tend something is to care for it. Together they turn the reflection into a relationship, in which faces are offered and then looked after. The echo is a quiet pleasure in itself, a near-rhyme in a poem that otherwise avoids rhyme.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of easy cheerfulness. It treats contentment as something built from attention, depth, and shared recognition, not from excitement. In a few lines and one clear image, it suggests that the steadiest kind of closeness may be like a calm pond: not free of ripples, but able to hold both faces anyway.