Four partners, a son, a scatter of grandchildren, and a woman who never gets a name. The poem has no title beyond a row of asterisks, and it runs through a whole life in thirty-nine lines by asking one question: who actually sees her?
The first stanza begins with her attention. She "stared at him as if there was nothing else to look at," but it takes him a month to want "to know more about her," and even then he "did not know how to touch her." The sadness that follows is a place, "the silent expanse between words and whispers." The second stanza shows her settling for a performance. Her new lover is "rife with lustrous gestures" and "could pretend that there was love in his eyes," and she accepts, because this is her "last chance to be observed measured desired / before her contents were judged by their cover." The old proverb is turned around. She fears that once her surface ages, nobody will read the rest. The touching is staged, with hands "prancing like puppeteers" and her body "as canonized sculpture," honoured and motionless. When she leaves him, he is "saturated in exultation," so the triumph was his all along.
Marriage is bleaker still. The line "another agreed to marry because he had no more use for her" is ambiguous, but its coldness is clear, since it makes marriage sound like a transaction. Her eyes change to "the full consonance of eventide," and nothing in "daylight" can "rouse her heart." The years pass in a single unpunctuated slide: "but one day and another and watching while life goes by." Her husband asks "who she would be without him," which sounds like a question but works as a claim of ownership. He shrinks into "a paintstruck clown in her rare dreams." When he dies she "learned to worship," and the poem never says what. Judging by the surrounding lines, it could be her own freedom or life itself, and the missing object leaves the reader to decide.
The final stanza nearly doubles in length (fifteen lines against eight), as if the poem finally slows down for the part that matters. First comes loss. Her son "escaped her elapsed endearment" and she becomes "the mother over whom a wife had to prevail." Her grandchildren crawl "to the beat of some uncanny anapest," the one place the poem names a regular rhythm, and it belongs to a family she is shut out of. The poem itself keeps no such beat. It has no rhyme, no capitals and no punctuation. Nearly every line is a plain clause starting with "she" or "he," like entries in a ledger, and the lines pour into one another so that the reader supplies the pauses.
Then the diction loosens. Her heart is "a diamond waiting to be excavated," a stock image, but "excavated" suggests slow digging, and the last man does it with "hard questions," unlike the husband's possessive one. He "took photographs and lingered over the wrinkles," which answers the fear of the second stanza, because the cover is read and loved. Their talk is bodily and funny: she can "cackle," and she is "glad to listen with her mouth." Even their shared stories are mixed with breakfast, as they "hoarded enough allegory to recite over coffee and toast," so a grand literary word sits beside toast.
The vocabulary is bookish throughout, with "canonized," "consonance," "anapest" and "allegory." The poem describes her life in the language of reading, which suits its theme of being read well or badly. Its last lines return to two earlier words. Their hearts are "encumbered with yearnings but having lingered / now no longer waiting to be reunited." The poem never says who is to be reunited with whom, perhaps with the "souls stored elsewhere" or with earlier selves, and I read the ending as relief that the waiting is over. Its significance lies in how it treats love as attention rather than display or ownership, and in how it lets a woman's late life end in company, laughter and being looked at properly.