Anatomy is the study of what lies beneath the skin, and this poem begins by turning that clinical word inside out. The first line gives us "all the anatomy of the body out of sight," the bones, organs and tissue no one ever sees in a living person. Then the sentence swerves from the medical to the physical: "to the kiss the press the every / desire singing." There is no verb and no punctuation. The phrase "out of sight to" is also ambiguous. It could mean the hidden body is invisible to a kiss, or that it is out of sight yet reaching toward one. Either way, the interior is present but unseen, and what we actually have is surface contact (kiss, press) and the force behind it.
The central idea, as I read it, is that intimacy depends on imagination. We never see inside the person we hold, or even inside ourselves, but we behave as if that hidden world were certain. The second stanza says outright that this resembles religious faith.
The first stanza's grammar enacts the breathlessness it describes. "The kiss the press the every" is a run of articles with no commas, each "the" opening a new thing before the last has finished. Then "every" is left hanging at the end of the line, an adjective with nothing to modify, as though the speaker can't stop to name what is wanted. The next line supplies "desire singing," and the word lands with some relief. "Singing" is a good choice. The voice is itself part of our hidden anatomy, and here desire makes that hidden machinery audible. That is my inference from the imagery, but it fits the poem's interest in how the unseen announces itself.
Then comes "but," the poem's turn. The simile, "like people knowing the true God," is sly. The poem says "knowing," not "believing in," and "the true God" has the ring of dogma, the language of people who allow no doubt. Yet the speaker doesn't sneer. The very next verb is "imagine." Believers claim to know, lovers admit they imagine, and the poem suggests the two acts are close relatives. Both take something that cannot be seen and treat it as undeniably there.
"A whole world absurdly set down / in our room" carries the humour and the tenderness. "Absurdly" is a candid admission that the disproportion is ridiculous: an entire inner universe crammed into one bedroom-sized space. "Set down" makes the world sound like luggage, or a piece of stage scenery, or something placed by a creator, and each reading echoes the God of the simile. The pronouns matter too. The first stanza is impersonal, all "the body" and "desire," but the second brings in "we" and "our." The poem moves from an abstract diagram to two people in a room, so what began as a lecture ends as a scene.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm comes from line length. The first line is long and the second shorter. The last stanza repeats the pattern, with the long, sprawling "we imagine a whole world absurdly set down" followed by the tiny "in our room." The poem shrinks the world to the size of the space it occupies, and the short final line makes the reader feel the squeeze. Sound does quieter work. The hissing of "kiss," "press" and "absurdly set" gives the poem a hushed, close-up texture. The "-ing" endings of "singing" and "knowing" link desire to faith, and the closing words "down" and "room" settle with a low, rounded sound, like something being put to rest.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It never uses words like "love" or "sex," and it doesn't need them. It treats the erotic and the religious as parallel leaps of imagination, without becoming either solemn or mocking. It also leaves us with a question. If we can only imagine what is beneath the surface, how much of anyone's inner world have we actually seen, and how much have we simply set down in the room ourselves?