Half a day disappears in the opening line of Darcey Mckelvey's untitled poem, and the rest is an attempt to work out where it went. The speaker sits at a window from "morning to evening," watching a green meadow, with one modest-sounding ambition: "to know just one true thing / about my very own soul." When she looks up, two inches of snow cover the field. Nothing is known here about when or why the poem was written, so everything rests on the words, and the words are enough.
The central puzzle is a gap between inner time and outer time. Half a day should not turn a meadow white, and the poem suggests the speaker has been gone much longer than she realised. "But left in thought" plays on two meanings, since she is both left alone and has *left*. The question that follows is surprising: "Where did I go?" Most people ask where the time went. She asks where *she* went, as if the person at the window and the person who searched for the soul were two separate people, and only one of them stayed behind.
The poem's form acts out this drifting. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the lines vary in length like thoughts that start and stop. The first line lands heavily on "lost," and its l-sounds echo in "left" and "lay," so the idea of loss runs quietly through the sound. The dash after "now" works like a pause for breath, the moment of looking up and seeing the snow. The enjambment in "How long did I / seek out for you?" leaves the word "I" stranded at the end of a line, which is a small picture of a self hanging in empty space. The punctuation in "for you?, who would never leave me" is untidy. A question mark gives way to a comma, as though the realisation barges in before the question can finish. That roughness feels truthful, because real insight rarely arrives in tidy sentences.
The imagery is spare but carefully shifted. The "green meadow" appears twice, and the second time it becomes "that once green meadow." The single word "once" turns a landscape into something mourned. The snow is never called white, but its effect is to erase the green. The window matters too. It is a clear barrier, a way of looking at the world without being in it, and the speaker uses it for the same purpose when she turns inward, trying to watch her own soul from a distance.
The most important key words are the possessives. "My very own soul" in line four returns in "my very own witness" at the end, and the repetition ties the two together. What she was hunting for through all those hours turns out to be the one doing the watching. The "you" in the last lines is never named, but the echo of that phrase suggests it is the soul or inner self she has been addressing all along. This is the poem's paradox. She went looking for someone "who would never leave me," and the only one who left was her, carried off by the very thinking that was meant to bring her closer.
The final phrase, "my here," is the poem's boldest move. "Here" is normally an adverb, a word that points, and making it a noun turns presence itself into something she owns. It also answers the earlier question. "Where did I go?" is met, in the last three words, by the one place she never actually left. Having asked for "just one true thing," she may have quietly been given it in the final line.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It makes no grand claims and takes place in a single sitting at a window. But it catches an experience almost everyone knows, the lost afternoon of daydreaming, and sees something larger in it: the part of us that watches is not something to be found by thinking harder. Even the title, three asterisks and no name, seems fitting, since the poem is about something that resists being labelled. It ends on a short, plain phrase, and the plainness makes it convincing.