Most love poems stay with the passion. Robert Creeley's speaker stays with what comes minutes afterwards, when a woman who has just been "completely / open" to him becomes shy about using the basin in a rented room. The poem's central idea is that intimacy is not the same as nakedness. The moment that tells the speaker most about love is a small, awkward, unglamorous one, and he is still turning it over long after.
The opening lines show how the poem works. "I approach with such / a careful tremor, always / I feel the finally foolish." The grammar wobbles. "The finally foolish" turns an adjective into a noun, as if the speaker cannot find the right word and settles for the nearest one. Nothing rhymes, and the poem has no regular metre. Instead the line breaks do the work, usually falling in mid-phrase, on small words like "with such," "on," "from" and "who had but." Each break makes the reader hesitate, so the poem moves with a stumbling, speech-like uncertainty. The "careful tremor" is in the syntax itself. The speaker is nervous about the memory, just as the woman in it is nervous about being seen.
That parallel matters. The speaker is not a confident observer. He fumbles his way toward the memory with a phrase like "the woman I loved / then, literally," in which "then" quietly admits the love belongs to the past, and "literally" insists on plain truth in a poem that otherwise sounds so unsure. The details are flat and specific: "a rented room on / 27th street," "the large / bed," "a basin with two faucets." Nothing is romanticised. Even his reading of her mind is hedged: she was "embarrassed I suppose I / would watch her." That "I suppose" shows he is guessing at her feelings and cannot be sure he has understood her, which fits a poem about the limits of knowing another person.
The irony is stated almost casually. She "had but / a moment ago been completely / open to me, naked, on / the same bed." Openness turns out to have a boundary, and the poem respects it, though it also crosses it. The speaker did watch, and the poem now makes the reader watch too. The word "sight" in the last line admits this. The details come one by one, like a slow, tender inventory: "her / head reflected in the mirror, / the hair dark there, the / full of her face, the shoulders." The odd phrase "the full of her face" puts a whole person into a few words, and the mirror doubles her, so that we see her from more than one side. "The hair dark there" is ambiguous, and it could mean the hair on her head or elsewhere on her body. The speaker's eye seems to drift, as it might in memory.
Then comes the blunt verb. She "turned on / one faucet and shyly pissed." The rest of the poem is hushed and careful, so "pissed" lands hard, and "shyly" softens it at once. Those two words hold the poem's whole mixture of crudeness and tenderness. The running faucet may be an attempt to cover the sound, though the poem never says so. It is an inference, but a human one, and it makes her shyness touching rather than comic.
The last line, "What / love might learn from such a sight," has no question mark and no full stop. It is not quite a question and not quite a lesson. The modal verb "might" leaves the lesson unstated, and the title "Something" is just as vague. Perhaps the point is that love learns to value vulnerability over display, or to accept that a person it adores still has a private self it must not claim entirely. The poem leaves that for the reader to work out.
That restraint is what makes the poem significant. It turns down both the cliché of the love poem and the shock value of the bodily detail. It treats a moment most writers would skip as the one that reveals the most. It also shows how a poem with no rhyme and almost no ornament can still carry feeling, because the hesitations in its line breaks and its grammar enact the care it is talking about.