Most tragedies are measured by what befalls someone: a loss, a betrayal, a disaster. Michael John Pickering's untitled poem, marked only by asterisks, begins by refusing that arithmetic. "A tragic life, not / for what happened but / for what did not." The sorrow here is absence, and the rest of the poem looks for an image big enough to hold something that never took place. It finds one in a book.
The book stands in for a life that was opened but never really read, or written. "The leaves were cut" suggests preparation. In older books the folded pages sometimes had to be sliced apart before anyone could read them. But the verbs that follow are quick and shallow: pages "skimmed", words "scanned". Nobody lingers. "Scanned" may also faintly recall the scanning of verse, though that is a possible echo rather than a certainty. Either way, the reading stays on the surface.
Then the poem turns to the blank pages, "infinitely many / empty flyleaves / opened in a fan." The picture is almost lovely, like a hand of cards or a spread tail, until the line break lets the air out of it. "To be / fittingly held in / no-one's hand." The line hangs on the preposition "in" and waits for its object, and what arrives is "no-one's." The word "fittingly" is the driest irony in the poem. Emptiness has found its proper setting, and nothing has been lost that anyone could point to.
"Leaves" also means the leaves of a tree, and the poem seems to use that second meaning. The next images come from fruit. Something said "in expectation of joy" was "underripe"; something said "in anticipation of pain" was "unacceptably bitter." The two sentences mirror each other like pans on a scale, and both words fail. What stands out is how speech is described. These words were shaped by what the speaker imagined beforehand, "expectation" and "anticipation," rather than by what was actually happening. Joy is spoken too early to be sweet, and pain arrives harsher than can be borne. "Unacceptably" is a flat, almost bureaucratic word, as if the pain were rejected like a faulty delivery, not suffered in a dramatic way. The tone stays cool, and that restraint makes the loss feel larger.
The ending offers a small hope and then withdraws it. "One leaf, it seemed, bore a message", and the hedge "it seemed" already doubts it. After the colon the message turns out to be a participle: "postponing." The syntax then performs what it describes. The sentence stalls on interruptions ("however, once more") and stutters on the sound of "more most." It stretches over three lines before it lands on its point, which is that most of what was to be said is put off "to what had been said before." The poem ends on "before", looking backward. The future is handed back to the past, so nothing new can be said, and the poem circles back to the place it started.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, so there is no click of closure. The early lines are short and nearly all plain, one-syllable words, with fragments that stop almost as soon as they start. The later lines lengthen and become more tangled, like a speaker who keeps approaching a statement and drawing back. The parallel sentences about joy and pain are the only passage with a strong pattern, and it is a pattern of two failures.
The poem's significance lies in how it makes absence concrete without melodrama. It gives a life of near-misses a body in the form of cut pages, a fan of blank leaves and unripe fruit, and it never raises its voice. It also practises what it describes: it is spare and hedged, and it ends in deferral, so the reader feels the withholding as well as understanding it. For a student reader, the poem asks a quiet, uncomfortable question about the things we mean to say and keep putting off.