The poem opens by handing a corpse to a lover. "Your eyes are palms," the speaker says, hands that can "mold my corpse into something, someone", as if the speaker were clay turning from object to person. The next image is the breath of a body that was empty before: "an unhollow breath". That odd negative word suggests the hollowness is still there, only denied. By the sixth line the speaker has named themselves "this misanthrope, i," in a lowercase that makes the self look small, and declares they are "no longer buried." A person who has kept the world at a distance is pulled back into life by one other person. That is the poem's central idea: love as resurrection, felt most strongly because it is private and cannot last.
The punctuation carries much of the meaning. A parenthesis opens in the middle of line three, at "your(allure", and does not close until "the clandestine of )us". Everything between, the starlit everglades, the "rosy dews", skin matching "in the dark", sits inside that bracket as if in a sealed room. The word "clandestine" lands just before the bracket shuts, and "us" is left outside, small and exposed. Later, "the finite(of our tongues" opens a second bracket that is never closed, and the poem ends with no full stop after "made the body weak." Read as an inference, the first bracket protects the love and the second suggests a memory that won't be finished.
There is no rhyme scheme and no regular metre, and the lines swell and shrink with the speaker's breath. Commas are pressed against the words that follow them ("something,someone", "sifting and starlit,evergreen"), so the language seems to crowd together like bodies. The sound is soft and liquid: the long *e* of "evergreen everglades" and "eddies," the whispering *s* of "sifting and starlit." The one real rhyme arrives suddenly: "not grass nor sea / not sky nor tree." The lines are short and chant-like, and they turn away from the usual material of nature poetry. What matters instead is "the remembrance of us." It is introduced by "o, how Mother cannot understand what this / means:", and that capitalised Mother and her incomprehension are left unexplained. The word "clandestine" hints that this love is hidden, but the poem never says from whom or why.
The tense also drifts. The early lines feel like wonder in the present, but soon the poem is full of endings: "the nostalgia of the last second," "the last hours of one summer's day," unrest that "slipped between our fingers, between our knees." Lovers who seem to be in each other's arms are already looking back at them. Even the phrase "the finite" admits that the closeness has a limit. The body language moves between the clinical and the tender. The "topography of our delicates" treats skin like a map, while "lips that ran themselves again and always again" repeats itself the way desire does. The closing triple, "everything, everyone, everytime," runs together into one overwhelmed word, and the last thing it does is make the body "weak." The speaker who was remade from a corpse is undone by the same love.
One strange phrase deserves a pause: "mistakable and heartedly." It sounds like a twist on "unmistakably" and "wholeheartedly." Whether deliberate or not, it makes certainty wobble a little, which suits a poem that is so sure of its feeling and so aware that the feeling is slipping away.
Nothing here depends on knowing who wrote it or when. The poem is interesting because its form acts out its subject. The brackets hide the love, the unclosed bracket and missing full stop refuse to let it end, and the lowercase "i" shows the self the love has rebuilt. It writes about desire without relying on the usual clichés, and it ends with its speaker still caught in the memory.