The speaker begins with a small morning ritual: getting dressed, pouring wine. From there the poem drifts into stranger territory. A "book of fire," finely bound and colored, seems to be a book of images, and the speaker has "undressed" all its figures, which suggests reading closely, stripping the pictures down to see what is underneath. The poem is quietly playful here, setting the speaker's own clothing against the figures he lays bare.
The title, "Distancing," points to the central idea. The speaker thinks about the space between things, a space that makes love or worship possible, since you need some gap to reach across or bow within. The last stanza turns this into something close to a warning: we consume what we believe we possess, and in doing so we lose it. The mood is calm, intimate and a little wistful. It feels like a private meditation, sensual but restrained, about how closeness and loss are tangled together.