Few poems commit to a metaphor as completely as this one. In its first three lines, two people become a book: "We were closed / like a book / with the sun // marking / our place." Everything after that is worked out in the vocabulary of reading. There are "leaves" (pages), "covers" and an "embossed" surface. The poem never says who "we" are, but the intimacy of the language, and the way the covers exchange something, suggest a couple. That is an inference from the imagery, not a fact the poem states.
The first image is the most surprising. The sun serves as a bookmark, "a visiting ray of memory / between leaves." Light slips between pages in a closed book only if the book is open a crack, so the closure is not total. "Visiting" matters too. A visitor does not stay, and a ray of sunlight moves across a room as the day goes on. The bookmark, then, is temporary, and it is described as memory rather than as something present. Because the poem is in the past tense ("We were closed"), the whole scene feels recalled rather than lived. "Closed" can mean sealed together, shut off from the world, or finished, and the poem lets all three hover without choosing.
"Leaves" is the poem's best pun. It means pages, but it also brings in trees, and the next stanza follows that thread: "the hills and dales / of our embossed / covers." Embossing raises a pattern from a flat surface, so the covers have a texture you could read with your fingertips. "Hills and dales" gives that texture the shape of a landscape. It is a cover, but it is also a body, and the poem lets the two pictures overlap without pointing it out.
The last stanza is where the poem becomes difficult. The covers "sipped / essences from / each other which / consumed / foment." The verb "sipped" is gentle and slow, like tasting. "Essences" suggests perfume, or the distilled core of a person, or the smell old paper picks up from whatever it has been shelved beside. Then the grammar loosens. "Consumed" could describe the essences, which were swallowed, or it could be a verb in its own right. "Foment" usually means to stir up or provoke, as in fomenting trouble, and here it has no object. Does the exchange stir something up? Is the consuming itself the stirring? The poem stops on the word without settling it, and that gives the ending a restless, unfinished feeling.
That feeling is helped by the form. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre, and it has no punctuation at all. The lines are short, often only two or three words, so the poem forms a narrow column, rather like a book's spine. Because the lines are so short, the breaks carry a lot of weight. "With the sun" hangs alone at the end of the first stanza, and the next stanza begins with "marking," as if the sun's ray were slipping across the gap. Lines like "which / consumed" are cut so finely that the reader has to slow down and take each fragment separately.
The sound is quiet and soft. Sibilants run through the poem ("sun," "place," "sipped," "essences," "consumed"), giving it a hushed, almost whispered quality. The long *e* of "leaves," "between," "memory" and "each" also links words from different stanzas, so the poem is held together by sound even though it has no rhyme.
The poem is worth reading for how much it packs into so little. It does not describe closeness directly. It lets a familiar object, a book on a shelf with its covers pressed together and a stripe of light across it, do the work. The title's "(1)" hints that it may belong to a sequence, though the poem on its own gives no further evidence of that. What the poem leaves the reader with is the paradox of a closed book. Nothing can be read from outside, yet pages and covers are in constant contact, and it may be that more passes between them than ever would if the book were open.