"It's the first thing I notice." Two people say this sentence in Lea's poem, one quoted and one answering, and the whole poem lives in the gap between them. For the first, noticing is a kind of self-punishment: the words come out "with your head tucked down," the body already folding away from the gaze. For the second, noticing is where desire begins. The sentence stays the same, but the eyes behind it do not. "My eyes are not yours," the speaker says, and that quiet line is the hinge of the poem.
The poem is about a part of the body its owner wants gone and the lover who finds it beautiful. It never says exactly what the feature is. The title, "Y-Shaped Fissure," gives only a shape and a cold, almost geological label, and the closing imagery suggests something that dips and branches. Because we never see the "it," we cannot judge it. We see only how it is looked at, which is the poem's real subject. The hesitant "It's just… there" shows the owner trying to shrug the feature off as nothing, while the ellipsis betrays how much it weighs.
The form copies this uncertainty. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme, no steady metre, and no stanza breaks. The lines are short and close to speech, and they stumble where the feeling does. Both "It's just… there" and "But I…" pause as if for nerve. Enjambment does careful work too. "Although" is left dangling at the end of its line before the speaker risks disagreeing. Then comes the bluntest moment: "You'd rid it, chop the part of you / That you like least off." The verb "chop" is violent, and the stranded "off" at the end of the line falls like a blade. The reply is two small words, "I'd kiss." In that single line the speaker turns "notice," a look, into touch, and sets the knife and the mouth against each other.
The last four lines drop speech and verbs entirely and become a picture: "Cold and hazy morning / Two perfectly parallel alabaster pebbles / Their shallow basin dipping in between." Alabaster is pale, smooth, faintly translucent stone, the kind sculptors prize. Pebbles are small things worn gentle by water, the kind you might pocket and keep. The sounds help, since "perfectly parallel" and "pebbles" share a soft, rounded *p*. Note also the word "perfectly." It is the speaker's reply to the idea of a flaw, slipped into a description that pretends to be only a description.
The vocabulary of the title joins in. "Fissure," "pebbles" and "basin" all belong to the language of terrain. A fissure in a landscape is not a defect but part of how the land is shaped, a place where water gathers. By describing the body in these terms, the poem turns the disliked feature into a natural contour, neither shameful nor remarkable, simply part of a beautiful scene. A "shallow basin" even suggests a place made to hold something, though the poem leaves what undefined.
"Half asleep, half awake" closes the poem without a full stop and without choosing. It could describe the hazy morning, the pebbles in half-light, or the two people. Judging by the imagery, it also suggests a moment when defences are down. We are least able to hide what we dislike about ourselves just after waking, and that is the moment the speaker chooses to look.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. Disliking some part of one's own body is a common, private experience, and the poem never lectures the person who feels it. It does not say "you are wrong to feel this way." It lets a second way of seeing sit beside the first and trusts the tenderness to be the argument. It also shows that the first thing we notice about someone need not be a flaw. It may be the thing we most want to touch.