Love is bargained down and then suddenly bargained up in this short poem, a single request made in nine lines. The speaker keeps asking the same question, "Could we fall in love…?", and each time shrinks the amount of time on offer: a day, a night, a moment. Only then comes the leap to "forever." The central idea is that the smallest scrap of love and the largest commitment spring from the same fear, the fear of being without this person.
The construction is simple and very deliberate. Every question opens with the same words, and each is answered by a "So I could know…" line, so the poem falls into three tidy pairs. Then the pattern breaks. The time scale matters here. A day, a night and a moment get smaller, not larger, so the speaker sounds more humble with every request. Phrases like "at least once" and "even if only for a second" are hedges, the language of someone asking for as little as possible. There is quiet sadness in that, because love is treated like something to be borrowed on trial and handed back.
The imagery moves inward. First the speaker wants to know "the way you taste," a surface, physical closeness. Next comes "the way you breathe when you sleep," which is more private, since it means seeing someone with no defences and nothing to perform. Last is the heartbeat, hidden inside the body and only knowable by being very close. Each thing the speaker wants to "know" is deeper than the one before, and none of them is spoken. Everything is sense and sound, which suggests the speaker wants a closeness that words can't give. The sixth line is the longest and the most hesitant. It piles up "only for me even ic only for a second" (the "ic" is evidently a slip for "if"), and the double "only" holds possessive hope and self-doubt together. The speaker wants to be the heart's one destination but will accept a single second of believing it.
Then the poem turns. "But now comes the hard part:" is almost spoken aloud, a wry aside that makes the earlier requests feel like a warm-up, or even a way of working up the nerve. The colon works as a drumroll. The final question then reverses the formula the poem has built. Three times the speaker wanted "to know" something, and now wants "never [to] have to know what it's like to be apart." Knowing, once the thing desired, has become the thing dreaded. The poem ends on the word "apart," the only mention of separation. Placed last, it reads as the fear that was behind every earlier question.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are long and close to everyday speech, as if overheard. The music comes from repetition and parallel phrasing, which give the poem a hypnotic, pleading rhythm. Every sentence is a question and none is answered, so the reader is put in the place of the person being asked, and the silence after the last line becomes part of the poem.
The title is a puzzle, since olives never appear in the text. This is only an inference, but the poem's interest in "the way you taste" may be the link. Olives are an acquired taste, salty and a little bitter, and love here is both sweet and tinged with fear. The olive branch, a traditional sign of peace and offering, could also fit a speaker who comes with open hands. The line in guillemets under the title, «Could we fall in love?», reads like the poem's real heading, the question everything else grows from.
The poem matters because it takes a very familiar feeling and gives it a clear shape using almost nothing. Its language is plain, but the order of its requests, shrinking and then suddenly vast, makes an argument about vulnerability. A person who asks for a moment is easy to refuse, and a person who asks for forever is risking everything. By putting both requests in the same breath, the poem shows that wanting a little and wanting everything can be the same wish.