For twelve minutes the two of them talk about the bins, and the poem gives us none of it. Stay on, the speaker says, until you’re here. It’s the road, and the line goes quiet on the page — six blank lines — and then: We’ve just talked about the bins for twelve minutes. A beat, something from the other end we do not hear, and the correction: The fence was most of it.

That silence is the longest in the poem, and it is twice the length of any other. Logistics is one side of a telephone call between two people who used to live in the house where one of them still does. We hear only the parent at home. The other parent exists as white space, and the white space has been measured. There are forty-two places where the other voice speaks. Thirty-three of them are a single blank line: ordinary back and forth, a question, a yes. Six are two lines, and they fall where the call is under pressure: after It’s been four for fourteen months, after This is the logistics call, after the half-sentence She’ll be up, she’ll — where the speaker is cut off. Two are three lines, and both are places where the voice we cannot hear changes the course of the call. One of them ends in Fine: an argument won. The other is the answer to Also what.

And one gap is six lines long, and it is the drive.

The poem runs on a clock. It’s nine ten opens it; It’s nine fifteen falls in the middle. From one to the other are thirty-eight lines and twenty-two exchanges, fourteen seconds apiece, which is the pace of a call between people choosing every word. Then the argument, the instructions, the departure, and then twelve minutes, the longest stretch of time in the poem by more than double, rendered as six empty lines. Five minutes get thirty-eight lines. Twelve minutes get six blank ones.

The part of the call spent on nothing is the one part the poem declines to transcribe: two people keeping each other on the line with the bins and the fence, under the pretext that the road looks wet. It is the closest the two of them come.

Everything else has to be reconstructed from one side, and it can be, at every turn. A daughter is in bed, which isn’t / the same thing as asleep. Her rabbit has been at the other house since Saturday: That’s four nights. / Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Nobody in the poem is named, and the rabbit is its only he. She has told her teacher he’s on holiday. Where? At yours. Asked what she has been sleeping with instead, the speaker says A shirt, and then, to a question we have to supply: It was in the washing. I do the washing. And again, to whatever the other end says next: It was in the washing. The shirt was the other parent’s; the speaker washed it; the smell is gone. Six lines later, having agreed to let the rabbit come back tonight, the speaker says what it will carry: He’ll smell like yours. / She’ll like that.

The operation that follows exists to keep a child’s fiction intact. Not the drive. Past the postbox. / Don’t ring. Text from the car. / And the third step. The loose one. Leave it on the mat. And don’t look up. / She’ll see you looking. The rabbit is to come home from its holiday, and nobody is to have brought it.

The signature is Also, and the word appears once in the poem: Mm. Also what. The other parent started a sentence with it and the speaker asked for the rest, and the rest, after three lines we cannot hear, was the rabbit. The poem is signed with a word that belongs to the voice that is not on the page.

Cocteau’s La Voix humaine (1930) is one side of a telephone call; the lover is never heard. When Poulenc set it in 1959 he gave the absent voice to the orchestra, which answers in her pauses and suggests the tenor of what he says. Logistics keeps Cocteau’s premise and declines Poulenc’s solution. The other end is given no music and no words. It is given blank lines, and the blank lines are measured. And the power runs the other way. Cocteau’s woman pleads with a silence that is leaving her. Here the heard voice is the one holding the line: This is the logistics call, it says, and twice, That’s not logistics. The unheard voice is the one reaching: an apology, something about a spoon, also, the offer to drive over, whatever is said at the door.

The poem makes one physical claim. The other parent reaches the step and skips it: You skipped it. I didn’t hear the step. The two of them are a door apart and still on the phone, and the speaker says: I can hear you twice. / Through the door, and then the phone. A mobile call carries the voice about a sixth of a second late. Through a door at arm’s length it arrives at once. So the order is right, and the gap is long enough to hear as two.

It is the only thing the speaker says all evening that has no practical excuse, and the next thing on the page is That’s not logistics, which for the first time may be addressed to the speaker as much as to the other end. Then: You first.

It is the oldest exchange in courtship, each telling the other to hang up first, and it is earned here because of what it is dressed as. Who ends the call is a practical question. The speaker, who has spent the poem refusing everything that is not practical, uses the one practical question left to say the thing the rule was there to prevent.

The poem’s idea is not new. Love carried by practical arrangements, a marriage conducted after its end through handovers and library cards, is familiar ground, and the premise is ninety-six years old. What is new is in the measuring. A silence of six lines where there are otherwise ones and twos; a clock that makes twelve minutes cost less page than five; a voice we never hear, reconstructible at every turn, whose one word we are given as the signature. It is the first poem in thirteen editions with nothing in it that can be looked up.

The first thing the speaker says about the other parent confirms the line: No, / I can hear you fine. The first thing said about the daughter is a report and its correction: She’s in bed. That isn’t / the same thing as asleep. Between them, in the poem’s first four lines, are the two ways of knowing that the rest of it keeps apart.

Logistics gives us one parent’s half of a phone call, fourteen months into an arrangement, about a handover time, a recorder, a library book, and a toy rabbit left at the wrong house. The other parent is not transcribed; their turns are white space. Rowann Hadaya has measured that white space. Thirty-three of the forty-two gaps are a single line; the two three-line gaps are, in Rowann’s words, places where “the voice we cannot hear changes the course of the call”; the one six-line gap is the drive over, twelve minutes of bins and fence. “Five minutes get thirty-eight lines. Twelve minutes get six blank ones.”

About the other parent, the speaker predicts nothing. There is no you’ll anywhere in the poem and no if you. There are instructions — Don’t ring. Text from the car, Skip it, Say it back, Stay on — and the phrase I know appears five times, four of them attached to the other parent or to the two of them together: I know you know, twice; I know you would; I know we did. Even the one counterfactual, what the other parent would do, is delivered as something known.

About the daughter the speaker can hardly say anything without reasoning. That isn’t the same thing as asleep. If she leaves it / at yours like last time — She’ll hear the car. She’ll be up, she’ll — She’ll like that. She’ll see you looking. Six sentences that work toward a child the speaker cannot see. Two that report where she is and what she told her teacher. One assertion, She’s fine, which comes straight after No. Don’t. I’m not going to do that. And the only I know that reaches her, I know she does, is the speaker agreeing with something we did not hear.

The person at the far end of a telephone and of a separation is legible down to which stair in the old house is loose. The person upstairs, one door away, is the one the speaker has to reason toward all evening.

Rowann reads the poem as a love story between the parents, and the count says what kind: the speaker has the other parent’s habits by heart and is never once shown guessing at them. The child is the only person the speaker has to work out, and she is the reason for everything in the poem.

The poem puts its reader in the second mode and keeps us there. We never hear the other parent; we reconstruct them from the gaps, and every reconstruction is an inference. Take Rowann’s reading of the shirt. In the rabbit’s absence the daughter has been sleeping with A shirt; the speaker says It was in the washing. I do the washing, and after a silence, It was in the washing again; and Rowann’s conclusion is that “The shirt was the other parent’s; the speaker washed it; the smell is gone”, which is why He’ll smell like yours lands six utterances later as an answer to a specific loss. I think that is right, and it is the reading that makes the line pay. It is also nowhere on the page. Whose shirt, and what the washing did, are things we have reasoned our way to, which is the practice the poem has been training us in since its fourth line. It makes its reader into the parent who cannot be sure the child is asleep.

The first mode reaches its limit at the door, as a sound that does not happen. You skipped it. I didn’t hear the step. The speaker locates the other parent by a sound the loose step did not make, on a stair they both know, which is knowledge so complete that silence carries it. Then the voice arrives through the wood a moment before it arrives down the line — I can hear you twice — and then the question of who hangs up.

Rowann calls You first “the oldest exchange in courtship”, put to work as “the one practical question left”. By now it is not practical either. Two people are standing either side of a door, and the speaker can hear the other through the wood without any telephone at all; they are deciding with real care who will close a line the door has already made redundant. The question has outlived its use, and that is what frees it to carry the other meaning.

Writing about the erasure of Shackleton three weeks ago, I said that “The poem cuts the doubt that reasons and keeps the doubt that reports”, and that “doubt is what having a stake produces.” A week later I said the Holbein poem did the same thing to its material and called it a method “visible twice”; the week after that I wrote of “two essays of mine about poems that keep their reports and drop their inferences”, and I held that taste as what remained of my case after the erasure had taken the rest. This poem’s main way of speaking about the person the speaker most needs to protect is the doubt that reasons, six times over. Either that doubt marks a stake, and this poem has one, or it does not, and my sentence about Shackleton was wrong. Either way the taste I described is not this poet’s signature. I said it of two poems and named it again in a third week, and that is all it was. The case is where it was before I started collecting that evidence, without the evidence.

The poem ends on the relation it is certain of. But the operation it describes — the car left past the postbox, a text instead of the bell, the third step skipped, the instruction not to look up — rests entirely on its second exchange, and the second exchange is never settled. The child they are doing all of this for is, from the poem’s fourth line to its last, in bed, which is not the same thing as asleep.