The poem opens with a fear and then makes it stranger. A "blind" experiment is one where the subject doesn't know what is being done to them. In a "double blind" one, the researchers don't know either. Corvi keeps counting, "triple, n-tuple", until the mathematical placeholder *n* takes over and the blindness has no limit. The speaker isn't only afraid of being watched. He is afraid of being watched by no one who understands what they are seeing. The title, set in square brackets, looks like a first line standing in for a missing title, which suits a poem about information that is withheld.
The second stanza swerves from paranoia into logic. "If there exist formulas in a given system / provable only by a system / more powerful than it" closely echoes Gödel's incompleteness theorems, the idea that a sufficiently strong system contains truths it cannot prove from within. Read next to the first stanza, it becomes a statement about the speaker's position: he cannot verify his own situation from inside it. The stanza also sets up a proof-like "if… then", but the "then" delivers no conclusion: "then light is an evil". The grammar of reasoning is intact, and what comes out is a mood. That gap between form and content is the poem's central trick.
The imagery that follows is the most sensuous in the poem, and it pulls against the abstraction around it. Light usually stands for knowledge, but here it is "worn through / like a veil / swallowed by unknown moths". A veil hides, so light as a veil means illumination that only conceals. Moths are drawn to light and also eat cloth, so the light is being consumed by the very thing it attracts. The word "unknown" slips the first stanza's blindness back in. The sounds are soft and dragging, with the v of "veil," the w of "worn" and "swallowed," and the long o of "worn" and "moths". Together they give the lines a muffled, fabric-like quality.
After that the poem begins to come apart on the page. "Rain / was once a body // of // st- / &- / ing // water" breaks the word *standing* into pieces, with the ampersand taking the place of "and". Rain is moving water, yet here it is remembered as a still, pooled body, and still water goes stagnant. The word "senescent", meaning growing old, confirms the decay. The comparison it leads to is the poem's boldest: the water is as old "as the im– / age of / an / omniscient god". The word *image* snaps in half, as if the picture were cracking. The wide gap in "omniscient god" leaves a hole in the line exactly where total knowledge should be. The lines also get thinner, down to single words like "of" and "an", so the poem seems to dwindle as it ends.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The rhythm comes from counting at the start ("single, double, / triple") and from the long, flat, technical sentence of the second stanza, which then gives way to the broken, hesitant lines at the end. The poem moves from speech, to argument, to image, to something close to visual silence.
What makes it significant is how it ties its ideas together. The "more powerful system" in the logic stanza is the thing that could prove what the speaker cannot, and an omniscient god is the grandest version of that system. By the end the poem has brought that figure forward and shown it as an old, cracked image. The experiment goes on, and nobody stands outside it to say what it means. The tone stays cool and exact, with no exclamations, so the fear reads as a conclusion the poem has reasoned its way to. It is a poem where the mathematics and the theology both run out of authority, and the language falls apart on the page to show it.