The poem opens mid-thought, with a lowercase "who" and no question mark, as if we have walked into a conversation already under way. "Who as ambassadors / will not have a treaty with time" can be read two ways. It may be a rhetorical question: what ambassador wouldn't want to strike a deal with time? Or it may be an accusation against those who refuse to make peace with it. The poem never settles this, and the doubt suits its subject. Time is the one power nobody negotiates with successfully, and the speaker knows it.
What follows is a retreat. "Be it one day only" borrows the courtly, legalistic mood of a clause in a contract, the kind of concession a diplomat makes when the full demand is out of reach. The speaker lowers the stakes from a lasting treaty to a single day. Even the setting shrinks: "a closet of pleasant talk." A closet is small and private, a place for hiding things, and "pleasant talk" is exactly what diplomats trade when the real business is elsewhere. The phrase is faintly ironic, since pleasantness is a surface and a closet is a place to keep things out of sight.
The next two couplets go down. First comes "the wine cellar / where we do business," then "the pit where we kiss / like people of ice." Closet, cellar and pit form a descent, each space lower, darker and more enclosed than the last. The "we" appears only now, at the end of the third and fourth couplets, so the poem moves from ambassadors in general to two particular people. Diplomacy turns out to be a metaphor for intimacy, or intimacy a metaphor for diplomacy. The poem keeps both readings open. The wine cellar suggests pleasure and ripening, yet it is also a place where things are stored and kept from the light. "Do business" is deliberately flat and transactional, as if the lovers, if that is what they are, were settling terms.
The last image is the strangest and the most precise. To kiss "like people of ice" is to kiss with cold formality, the stiff embrace of two representatives. It also suggests fragility. Ice does not last, and a treaty with time would be a treaty with the thing that melts it. Read this way, the coldness is not simply a lack of feeling but a form of self-protection, or an admission that the closeness is temporary. The word "pit" adds danger, even a hint of the grave, and sits uneasily beside "kiss." Tenderness and mortality share one small space.
The poem's construction is spare. It is free verse in four couplets, with no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation at all. The lack of punctuation lets phrases drift into one another, so "be it one day only" can attach to what comes before and what comes after. After the first couplet, the poem drops verbs of its own. Three noun phrases (closet, cellar, pit) are laid down like items in a ledger, an effect that suits a poem about negotiation. The sound work is quiet but noticeable. The *t* of "treaty" and "time" gives the opening a clipped, official ring, and the soft *p* sounds of "pleasant," "pit" and "people" link the final two couplets. "Ice" ends the poem on a hiss, which fits a poem about something cooling and vanishing.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so few words. It shrinks a large subject, human mortality, into the vocabulary of statecraft, and it lets the reader decide whether the "business" is love, friendship or something less definable. Its comedy and its sadness come from the same place: grand institutional language applied to a hidden, cramped, temporary kind of happiness. The ambassadors are asking for one day. The poem suggests that this modest request is the only treaty with time anyone ever gets, and that it is worth making even if it is signed in a pit by people made of ice.