The brackets in the title do a small, clever job before the poem has properly begun. Remove them and you get "attentive"; keep them and you get "inattentive", with the negative half-hidden, like a fault tucked out of sight. The word holds both meanings at once, and that doubleness is the whole poem in miniature. The speaker is intensely attentive to one thing, and for that very reason inattentive to everything else.
The first stanza is a plain confession. "Mind fixed on my art" makes devotion sound like paralysis. "Fixed" suggests something pinned in place, a fixed star or a stare that cannot be broken. Then comes the line break after "I have been silent and given". For a moment, "given" stands alone and sounds generous, as if the sentence will report something offered. The next line, "little of myself", takes it back. The verb tense matters too. "Have been" suggests a stretch of time still unfolding, not a single lapse. The poem never says who has been shortchanged, and judging by the phrase "given little of myself", it seems to be other people. That blank may be part of the point. The neglected person is so absent from the speaker's attention that they do not even get named.
The second stanza turns from statement to image, and it does so without a single "like" or "as". "The moon at noon" is a strange, quiet sight: a pale disc in a daytime sky, visible but washed out, present in the wrong hour. The moon usually belongs to night, with its stars and its sense of company. At noon it is surrounded only by glare. Then comes the family word: the moon "is a brother / to no one." The poem asks us to connect the speaker to this faint daytime moon, but it never does the connecting for us. That restraint is typical of the whole piece. The speaker is physically present, like the moon, yet gives off no warmth. They have withdrawn from the kinship that "brother" implies.
The sound of the last stanza deepens the effect. "Moon at noon" is the poem's only real rhyme, so the phrase feels snug and paired, as though two words had found each other. Then the final words, "no one", repeat the sound of "noon", but split into two separate words. The closeness of the rhyme is pulled apart into negation. Loneliness is built from the same sounds as the picture of the moon.
Elsewhere the poem avoids pattern. There is no regular meter and no rhyme scheme. The lines are short and shrink as they go: roughly five, eight and five syllables in the first stanza, then four, four and three in the second. The poem narrows toward its last phrase. Everything is lowercase and unpunctuated except the pronoun "I", the only capital on the page. That detail may be accidental convention, but it fits: the self that has been withheld is the one thing left standing out.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a cost that is often glossed over. Dedication to art is usually admired, and the image of the absorbed, solitary artist can seem almost glamorous. This speaker offers no such flattery. There is no apology, no promise to change, and no complaint either. The tone is level, almost observational, as if the speaker is noting a fact about the weather. There is also a quiet irony in the poem's existence. The confession of silence is made in the very medium the speaker has been devoted to, so the art that caused the neglect is also the only place it gets admitted. The poem's economy recalls the compression of haiku, and like the best very short poems it trusts the reader to finish the thought.
The ending refuses to tell us how to feel. A moon at noon is not dramatic or tragic, just unnoticed, and the poem leaves us wondering whether that is a sorrow or only a fact. In a poem this short, that open question is what lingers.