Nothing in "Looking for the Reader" is dramatic, and that is its charm. A woman is searching her cluttered desk for something and sending running reports to the speaker, who simply writes them down. The "reader" she wants is never described. The mention of "xd memory cards" and a lost "cable" suggests a memory-card reader, but the poem doesn't say. It never finds the thing, and what it finds instead is a portrait of a life in small objects.
The imagery starts with a metaphor. The desk is "a sea of paper," and the reader might "surface" from it. Objects "emerge" from "an ancient layer," so the sea quickly becomes an archaeological dig. Both images turn a messy desk into something with depth and history, and the list that follows bears this out. Each find is trivial, but together they sketch a person: "buttonhole scissors," "pink sewing cotton," "a nintendo stylus," "a folding / plastic fork." There are also "two / passport pictures of A.," and the single initial makes A. a quiet mystery. The hotel tissues come with a full address, "Karol Bagh, New Delhi-5." A packet of tissues has preserved a journey, and the exactness of the address is funny and touching at once. The milk-and-biscuit receipt "which I should have / claimed in March last year" and the "prefect's / badge from school" stretch the dig across years, from the schoolgirl to the office worker with unclaimed expenses.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its rhythm is the rhythm of typing and talking. The poet frames the messages with two plain lines, "My love sends instant / messages while she works" and "Five minutes later," and then mostly steps aside. The line breaks do the shaping. They fall in awkward places, as in "from / a sea of paper," "an / ancient layer on / my desk," and the split word "un- / signed credit card." They make the speech stutter and pause like someone typing between tasks. The ampersands reinforce this, giving the lines the shorthand feel of a chat window. The long catalogue of finds also does something to the pace. Each item is small, but the list piles up until it is both comic and exhausting.
The phrase "No reader" works almost like a refrain, and it fades. First it is "No reader yet," still hopeful. Then "But no reader," and then a flat "No reader." In the last stanza the search is forgotten altogether. A second credit card ("This one / is signed") distracts her, and the poem ends on a tentative, domestic non-resolution: "I suppose / I should cut / them up." The "I suppose" suggests she probably won't do it soon. Many readers will recognise the way a search for one thing dissolves into the contents of the drawer.
Small corrections give the voice its personality: "an / apple pip—make / that two / apple pips." That self-correction shows someone who counts and cares about being accurate even when it doesn't matter. The same pleasure in counting runs through "two keys, three / xd memory cards, one paperclip." The speaker, by choosing to record all this, shows the same attention. The poem is also called "My love," and the phrase is both an endearment and a name for the person. The speaker's affection is never stated; it shows in his willingness to treat her list as worth preserving.
There is also a pun in the title, which I take to be deliberate. The woman fails to find her reader, but the poem has found another one, and that reader is us, who sit through an inventory of a stranger's desk and end up enjoying it. The judgement that a messy desk deserves a poem is part of what makes the piece significant. It argues, lightly, that ordinary clutter holds as much evidence of a life as any grand event, and that love can be expressed by paying close attention to the unimportant.