Mike Stone's «No Matter» begins with an admission of failure and then spends the rest of its short length explaining why that failure is so strange. The speaker cannot read the mind of someone they love, yet that mind is "open like a book / And spread across the sky." Nothing is hidden, and still nothing can be understood. The poem never names the person, but the "ashen lips" and the line "In death your words" make clear that the speaker is addressing someone who has died. What is left is a problem of reading: the evidence is everywhere, and the meaning is out of reach.
The form suits that frustration. The poem is free verse, with no regular meter and almost no rhyme. The one clear echo is "try" in the first line and "sky" in the fourth, which quietly links the speaker's effort to something enormous and unreachable. The opening is also broken up by white space, so that "No matter how hard I try," and "I cannot read your mind," each stand alone, like someone stopping to breathe between admissions. The word "Though" then opens two stanzas in a row, and each time it complicates the claim before it. The second-to-last line, "Incomprehensible to the sighted or the living," is the longest in the poem, and its mouthful of a first word acts out the very thing it names. The final line is short and level, and it lands with a calm that the rest of the poem hasn't earned yet.
The imagery moves between the vast and the intimate. The mind is a book as big as the sky, but the "signs that you were here" are found in "my beaten heart." The signs are clear in the heart and not in the head, which suggests that the speaker knows the dead person in one way and fails to understand them in another. "Beaten" works twice: the heart is bruised by loss, but it is also still beating, which is why it can keep receiving these signs.
The phoenix is the poem's most ambitious image, and it turns out to be an uneasy one. The speaker tries to "resurrect / Your image phoenix-like / From your ashen lips." A phoenix rises from its own ashes, but here the ashes are lips, the part of a person that speaks. The speaker is hoping that a voice, and with it a whole person, might come back. The word "Still" shows how stubborn that hope is, and the poem never says it works. The next stanza reads like an answer: the words do survive, but changed.
That change is "braille." Braille is a language you read with your fingertips, and it is a clever choice because it keeps the book metaphor going while taking away sight. The dead person's words are still there, raised and waiting, but they can't be read with the eyes. The poem then reverses an assumption we barely notice. "The sighted or the living" are put together as people who cannot understand, so the living are the blind ones. Understanding belongs to those "beneath the earth." Judging by the tone, this is both consoling and a little chilling. It suggests the dead person's meaning is not lost, only moved somewhere the speaker can't go yet.
The title adds one more layer. "No matter" can mean "however hard I try," which fits the opening, but it can also mean "no substance," as if the dead have lost their physical matter and kept only meaning. That second reading is an inference, but it fits a poem so concerned with what remains once the body is gone.
The poem is significant because it gives grief an unusual shape. It could have been a lament for silence, but it describes a message that exists and cannot be received. In just a few short stanzas, Stone turns the familiar idea of "reading" someone into a story about the limits of the living, and the last two lines leave us with a quiet reversal: the ones we call blind may be the ones standing above ground.