Three small gestures are all that happen here: a glance, a smile, a held hand. Yet each one opens onto a whole room of objects, and by the end the woman named in the title has been assembled entirely from things that are sweet, fragile, musical and a little sad. The title itself is unusual. "Michey" looks like a name, and the gloss «her» beneath it reads like a label or a translation. The poem's whole task is to explain what that one small word contains.
The construction is strict. There are three five-line stanzas, and each follows the same frame: "She [verb] me / With [body part] made of," followed by a list of three. There is no rhyme and no end punctuation anywhere, so repetition does the work that rhyme would normally do. The sequence is carefully ordered. The verbs move from "glances" to "smiles" to "holds," and the body parts move from eyes to lips to fingers, from looking across a distance to touching. The speaker only ever receives, in "at me," "at me," "my hands." She acts, and the speaker is left to take it in.
The first stanza sets the pattern of sweetness undercut by loss. "Honey" and "walnut" are both warm, brown, plausible colours for eyes, and then "Ashes" arrives between them as the grey remains of something burned. Each of the first two items gets its own line, so the reader has to pause on it. "Walnut bookshelves" shifts from colour to atmosphere. It suggests a quiet room that smells of wood and old paper, and eyes that could be browsed like a library, full of things read and unread.
In the second stanza, "Blushing conversations" is a transferred image, since people blush and talk does not. That makes the smile a shy exchange of words, caught just as it turns pink. "Wilting roses" are not dead but in the middle of fading, so time is passing even inside the tenderness. Then "pearls" arrive as the hard, smooth, lasting counterweight, and judging by the placement, they may also hint at teeth behind the lips.
The last stanza is the most musical. "Ivory" suggests piano keys, and the next line goes on to the music itself, so the fingers are both the keys and the sound they make. Ivory is also what remains of something once alive, which quietly echoes the ashes. Then "petals" brings softness back. Two small changes happen here. The commas disappear, and so does the "And" that closed the lists in the first two stanzas. The final list never shuts, and the poem ends without a full stop, as if it could keep going. The phrase "Flowers petals" is also slightly off from standard usage. Whether intended or not, it gives the ending an unpolished, almost hurried tenderness.
Taken together, the images fall into two groups. Honey, pearls and petals are sweet and gentle. Ashes and wilting roses carry time and decay. Bookshelves, conversation and piano music add a cultivated, domestic world, so she is described less as a person than as a house with a library and a parlour, somewhere to be inside. The poem never says whether the love is happening now or is being remembered, but the ashes and wilting roses suggest it knows it cannot last forever.
The poem is worth reading for how much it gets from so little. It has no argument and no story, only a repeated formula, yet the formula holds a complicated feeling, in which adoration and sadness sit in the same line. It also shows how metaphor can describe a character without explaining her. We never learn what Michey says or does, only what it is like to be looked at, smiled at and held by her. That leaves the reader to decide whether the poem is a celebration or a quiet elegy, and it may well be both.