Two closed books are not an obvious picture of closeness. A closed book keeps its contents to itself, and nobody can read it. Michael John Pickering begins with exactly that image, then turns it around. His books may be closed, but each one is "marking / a place in / the other." They are not sealed off from each other. Each is tucked inside the other, holding its page. The image suggests a couple who are shut to the world and wholly bound up with each other, each one a bookmark in the other's story.
The line breaks do a lot of the work. The first sentence is split by white space after "each marking," so the reader has to wait for the thing being marked, as if a page were being turned. That is my reading, but the pause is hard to miss. The sentence also ends on "the other," a phrase that returns at the very end of the poem and frames everything between.
The middle stanza keeps the simile and reverses the state: "We were open / like two books." Open books lie face up, exposed. Now the marking is done not by the two of them but by "the sun," an impersonal bookmark that cannot hold a place for long, since light moves across a page as the day passes. The phrase "where we had been" is in the past perfect, a step further back than the poem's other verbs. The openness is already over by the time it is described. Whatever happened is never explained, and the reader has only the grammar to go on.
The final stanza repeats the opening almost word for word: "We were closed / like two books." But it ends differently: "when one stood / next to the other." In the first stanza the books were *in* each other, and now they are *next to* each other. The picture shifts easily to a shelf, where books stand side by side as neighbours, perhaps with spines touching, but with no bookmarks and no shared pages. The verb "stood" adds to the effect. It sounds upright and a little formal, like two people standing together in a photograph or at a bus stop, still close but no longer inside each other's stories. "Closed" meant privacy the first time and means reserve the second. The words stay the same while the relationship behind them changes, and the whole poem turns on one preposition.
The form is quiet to match. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation, only the full stops that end each stanza. The lines are tiny, mostly three or four syllables, and they fall into hushed, even steps. Repetition does the job rhyme would normally do. "We were closed / like two books" comes back like a refrain, and the familiar phrase makes the small changes around it stand out. Every verb is "were," so the whole poem is told from afterwards, with nothing in it that is happening now. Each stanza is exactly thirteen words long, which gives the poem a tidy, shelf-like order. The tidiness is slightly chilling, because the poem treats a relationship's whole history so neatly.
The numeral in the title, "(2)", hints that this poem belongs to a pair or a sequence. The poem still makes sense without a companion. Whether it is part of a larger sequence matters less than how much it gets out of one image. The conceit of lovers as books could easily turn sentimental, since reading someone and knowing "where we'd got to" are familiar romantic ideas. Pickering avoids that by saying very little. He does not blame anyone, name a cause, or tell us how to feel. A stanza of intimacy, a stanza of exposure and fading, and a stanza of polite distance leave the reader to work out the story.
The poem also reminds us that two people can be described by the same word at different times, and that the difference may lie in a small word like "in" or "next to." Many longer poems say less about how closeness ends.