Seven short lines, no punctuation, and one grammatical oddity that does most of the work: the speaker and a companion undress, but not out of anything. They undress *into* things. That small switch of preposition carries the poem's central idea. Taking off a guise isn't a loss or an exposure. It is a way of stepping into other ways of being, and here it happens through another person's tenderness.
The opening line, "no time to change," sounds like an idiom of hurry, the kind of thing you say before rushing out the door. Its double meaning, changing clothes and changing oneself, is already in the title, since a guise is both a costume and a role. The line break lets the phrase sit alone for a moment, almost like a verdict, before the next line contradicts it. "my companion and I undress" is the one kind of change that needs no time at all. The phrasing is also a little formal. "My companion and I" is textbook correct, and the companion stays unnamed. Judging by that reserve, the speaker may not have shed every guise yet, even mid-undressing.
Then comes the repeated "into," four times in four lines. Normally we undress *out of* our clothes, so the poem turns subtraction into arrival. The things entered move from concrete to abstract: first a place ("the night between walls"), then an event ("a young kiss and an answer"), then a quality ("kindness"). The night almost becomes a garment, something put on as the clothes come off. "Between walls" suggests enclosure and privacy, though the poem never says whether this is a room, a corridor or somewhere else. "Young" is pleasantly slippery. It could describe the kiss, the people or the night itself. And "an answer" implies a question nobody had to ask aloud. The kiss is a two-way exchange, not just something done to someone. The climax, "kindness," is the shortest line in the poem, and its quiet landing matters. The high point is gentleness, not passion.
The last stanza widens the view. Occasions are what people normally dress for, such as weddings, interviews and parties. Here the speaker undresses into a "variety" of them, which turns the usual logic upside down. Notice also that the word is "variety," not "truth" or "true self." Taking off the guises doesn't reveal one bare identity underneath. It opens up many possible ones, which fits the plural title. The final clause, "that I have not made with myself," is the longest line, and it slows the poem into something like an admission. To "make" an occasion is to arrange it, as one makes an appointment. The speaker has never arranged such moments alone, so they seem to need another person to happen. The poem ends on the word "myself," as if the whole movement outward had been a roundabout route back to the speaker, with a hint of wonder or perhaps regret.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no capital letters, and no sentence ever reaches a full stop. The lines slip into one another as the "intos" do, so the poem feels like one continuous motion rather than a series of statements. The stanzas run two, three, two. The three-line middle, where the kiss and the kindness sit, is literally held between two shorter stanzas, a quiet echo of "the night between walls." The sound is soft too. "Kiss" and "kindness" share a hard *k*, and "night" and "kindness" share a long *i*, so the key words faintly chime without any formal rhyme scheme.
The poem is slight on the page, but it is a good lesson in how much a preposition can do. By recasting the cliché "no time to change" as an act of undressing, it suggests that real change can be quiet, quick and mutual. By ending on an occasion the speaker "has not made with myself," it also admits that some versions of us only appear when someone else is there. For a reader, the pleasure lies in noticing how a poem so plain in vocabulary can tilt a familiar situation until it means something different.