The speaker remembers a woman, and the scene is small and ordinary: a liquor store, a linoleum floor, the dark red wine she always picked. That wine leaves a bitter aftertaste, but her bare torso, he says, doesn't. It holds everything that drunkenness ever was, so desire and intoxication blur into one thing.
Then the poem turns to the pain underneath. He misses her terribly, and they both still love each other, yet she ends things because she believes she has to. He calls this "exquisite torture," a phrase that mixes beauty and agony. The last line shifts the red of the wine to his own body, which is "incarnadine," a rare word for blood-red. The poem suggests he is flushed or wounded by the loss. The mood is intimate, sensual and sorrowful, with the broken, trailing lines mirroring a mind that can't quite settle on its grief.