Read the poem aloud and you keep waiting for a sentence to finish. It opens on "While you put your hands, that," a clause leaning forward for a main verb that never arrives, and from there the syntax stalls, doubles back and starts again. That restlessness is the poem's real subject. The title, "Your Hands a Poem of Love," has no verb joining hands to poem, and the text spends its lines testing what that equation might mean: whether touch can do the work of language, and what happens when two people try to say through the body what words won't quite hold.
The most important word may be "name." It appears twice, both times tied to the hands. First the speaker wants to "At last be able / To name," and then comes "Your hands naming the thrust and space around it." Naming is normally what a mouth does, and here it is handed to fingers. Look at what gets named: not only the "thrust" but "the space around it," presence and absence together. The poem seems less interested in desire itself than in the charged emptiness around it. That emptiness appears earlier as "distance," where "the rules" are "Written," as if the gap between two people were a page they must learn to read.
The imagery is mostly about approach. There is "Crossing a bridge," and then a lovely, sprawling line, "The other way around the back way or head on, coming," which offers every route to someone and never chooses. The break after "coming" makes the reader arrive at "to it" a beat late, as if hesitating on a threshold. A few lines later comes a small paradox: "the angles used / To talk straight." Honest speech about intimacy, the poem suggests, rarely travels in a straight line.
That "it" never has a noun to attach to. It turns up in "coming / to it," "around it" and "Close upon it," while "that" appears twice as a stranded pointer ("hands, that," and "around it, that,"). The speaker keeps gesturing at something and failing to find its name. The withholding makes the reader do what the lovers do: move toward something felt but not yet spoken.
The form fits this. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady meter, and its line lengths wander. After that long, winding line comes "To name." Two syllables, then a full stop, the only place where the syntax comes to rest. The single moment of success is brief. Around it, infinitives pile up ("To discover," "To talk," "To name") like a list of aims not yet reached, while complete, confident statements are rare.
Smoke frames the poem. "The house, filling with smoke" appears in the middle, and "Hands and smoke / Filling the house" closes it. Smoke might suggest fire, desire, danger, or simply blurred sight, and the poem doesn't choose among them. What changes is the stance toward it. At first the house simply fills. By the end the speaker proposes to "look, go through / Hands and smoke." Pronouns and verbs shift with that: "you" and "I" become "we," and "put" gives way to "would bring" and then "will look," moving from observation to offer to shared promise. The line "I would bring you bringing me" builds reciprocity into its grammar, with matching participles that make each person both giver and receiver.
The poem matters because it is a love poem that refuses to describe the beloved or list feelings. Its broken syntax reads less like carelessness than like honesty, since intimacy here outruns grammar and the fumbling is part of the tenderness. Even the last word, "Filling," is a participle that keeps going, so the house never finishes filling and the sentence never quite closes. The poem ends in the middle of the act it is trying to name.