Memory in this poem arrives through the sense of touch. The speaker looks back on a lover who came late at night and left at sunrise, and the whole poem is built around skin: how it felt, what it warmed, and how it was seen. The central idea is that closeness can be tender and uneasy at once. The speaker treasures these nights but never quite believes they are secure, and the final lines show why.
The opening is full of warmth, but look at where the touch lands. "Your skin was smooth against the covers of my bed," the speaker says, and later, "when you skin touched the blankets it blessed my spot all week." The lover's skin touches covers, blankets and a "spot" rather than the speaker directly. The intimacy is displaced onto objects, and the bed becomes a kind of shrine that holds the trace of someone absent. The verb "blessed" supports this, since it lifts an ordinary night into something almost sacred. The warmth also outlasts the visit: "kept me warm at night" is physical comfort, but "all week" suggests an emotional afterglow, or perhaps the loneliness of the days between.
Time matters just as much. "Early morning sunrises on sundays" strings together soft, hissing s-sounds, and the sun returns in "left with the sun," where it almost becomes a rival that takes the lover away. The repeated pattern of arriving late and leaving at dawn is a relationship that exists only in the dark. The tenses add to the sense of loss. Everything is "was" or "would," the grammar of habit and memory, so the reader understands that these nights are over, or at least no longer certain. That is an inference from the verbs, since the poem never says what happened.
The sixth line turns the poem. After a run of physical detail, "But I remember watching you sleep" shifts the focus from touch to sight, and the imagery turns military: the sleeping lover is "a stalemate in the war between our hearts." It is a striking image. Sleep is a truce in which neither heart can win, and the speaker is free to watch without being judged. Then comes the sting: "when you would awaken our love would battle others." The line is ambiguous. The "others" might be other people, other commitments, or the outside world that the couple has to face by daylight. The poem doesn't say, but the vagueness is effective, because it leaves the reader sensing a threat without being able to name it.
The last two lines hold the poem's emotional truth. "Your skin was soft againgst my callused fingers, / And my skin was sickly against your gazing glare." The contrast is between softness and roughness, and then between health and sickness. "Callused" suggests hands that have worked or been toughened, while "sickly" shows how the speaker feels under the lover's eyes. The phrase "gazing glare" is the most interesting choice in the poem. A gaze is usually loving and a glare is hostile, so the words pull against each other. Perhaps the lover's look is gentle and the speaker's insecurity turns it harsh, or perhaps the look really is judging. Either way, the speaker feels exposed. The poem began by praising the lover's skin and ends by condemning the speaker's own.
The form suits this unsteady feeling. There is no regular rhyme scheme and no fixed rhythm, so the poem reads as free verse. The lines are long and conversational, and their uneven lengths make the voice sound like someone thinking aloud. Every line ends with a comma until the final full stop, so the memory runs on without pausing and only stops when the speaker admits their insecurity. The sound patterns that do appear, such as "smooth" and "soft," "sunrises" and "sundays," and "gazing glare," are small and quiet. The odd slips in spelling and grammar, "when you skin" and "againgst," also give the poem the feel of a draft written quickly and sincerely, though that is a reading of the text and not a fact about how it was composed.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about mixed feelings. It would have been easy to write only a love poem about soft skin and warm blankets. Instead the speaker admits that tenderness comes with fear, and that being desired is not the same as feeling worthy of it.