A tick has no interest in paperwork. That is the joke at the centre of Dave Bonta's "Parasight," and also its sting. In two couplets, the poem sets a social fact, a woman's being married, against a creature for whom it means nothing. The tick "took no notice," and the phrasing is so flat and well-mannered that it sounds like a guest complaining about being overlooked. The indifference is funny first and unsettling a moment later.
The title carries much of the weight. "Parasight" is "parasite" with one letter changed, so that the word for a creature that feeds on another becomes a word about seeing. The prefix "para-" means "beside," which suggests a way of looking that runs alongside ordinary human sight and sees something different. Ticks are hardly known for their eyesight, so the sight here can't be literal. It is the poem's own vision, which asks us to drop to the tick's level and look at a person without the labels that make her a wife. The word "notice" in the first line quietly echoes this: the tick fails to notice her marriage, yet the second stanza is all about what it, or someone, does find.
The construction is spare. There is no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme. The lines run six, six, four and four syllables, so the second stanza is a tightened version of the first, as though the poem were closing in on its target. The first line is a complete sentence, "the tick took no notice," and the next line arrives like an afterthought: "of her being married." That small delay works like comic timing. The phrase "being married" also makes marriage sound like a condition or a state, something one might be in the way one is in a fever, and not the solemn institution it usually claims to be. The hard consonants of "tick took" have a dry clicking quality, while "no notice" and "married" soften into nasals, so the sound moves from the creature's blunt appetite to the human world it ignores.
The second stanza is stranger. "Finding her face / under the bed" has no stated subject. We assume the tick, but the participle floats free, and it could just as easily be the woman, or the reader. The line break leaves "face" alone for a beat before dropping it "under the bed," where it sounds like a lost earring or a slipper, something mislaid and retrieved from the dust. The image is faintly surreal and faintly horrible. Is she on the floor? Is the face a mask? Is the tick simply crawling over a sleeper's cheek and the poem seeing it from below? The poem doesn't say, and the ambiguity is part of its force. It also seems to turn over the idiom "losing face," which is about social standing and public dignity. Here the face is not lost in disgrace but found, stripped of status and treated as one more warm surface.
There is a neat frame too. The poem's key words are "married" at the end of the first stanza and "bed" at the end of the second, so the marital bed is there, but we see it from underneath, among the dust, rather than from the pillow. The place where marriage is supposed to be most intimate becomes simply a piece of furniture with a gap beneath it. Judging by the imagery, the poem hints that our deepest social bonds look very different from a lower, hungrier angle.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It has the compression of haiku or senryu, though it doesn't follow their syllable count, and it mixes a deadpan joke with a real chill. It doesn't lecture about nature's indifference to human arrangements; it lets a tick demonstrate it. A reader may leave amused, but also with the odd feeling of having been briefly made to see a person as a host, as a body and a face rather than a name and a ring.