The title promises instructions, but the poem delivers a warning. An old man loves a wall because its bricks are the colour of a woman's lips. A second figure, "she", tends his injuries and finally kisses the same wall herself. The central idea is that some love can only travel by detour, through memory, through a stand-in, through something that cannot answer. The poem also suggests that people sometimes prefer a haunting to the truth, because the haunting has become who they are.
The opening lines fuse the human and the solid. The bricks are "perfectly the color of her lips", and a few lines later his fingers sink into "soft red flesh". Brick is neither soft nor flesh, so the contradiction shows his imagination overriding his senses. The simile "Cracked like an old scab" is blunt and bodily. A scab is a wound half healed, and the comparison hints at a grief he keeps picking open. Even "sweet nothings" turns literal, since he is whispering to nothing. The word "apparition" appears twice, first as a ghost of memory and then as a "stone apparition". The ghost has been given a solid form, and that is exactly the problem.
The knottiest lines come next. "His clouded eyes miss the white cracks / Not to be allowed to drip their innocence / On his haunting." Judging by the imagery, the white cracks may be the mortar between the bricks, the place where the wall shows itself to be only a wall. The grammar is passive, so we never learn who forbids them to drip. The likeliest answer is that he does, since seeing them would end the illusion. The next line spells out the stakes: "Without which he is just another brokenhearted old man." His grief gives him a story, and he would be "Remembered only by the stories he whispered". He is afraid of being forgotten, so he clings to the wall.
Then the poem turns to "she", who is never named. One reading, which is an inference and not something the text states, is that she is a second woman who cares for him. She wipes the blood from his fingers, "Each individually with care", and the slow, particular attention contrasts with his blind pressing against the brick. The phrase "the violence of his love" is striking because the only one hurt is himself. The white cloth carries "innocence", the same word used for the cracks, but now it is stained. His memory spoils her cleanliness, and her kindness costs her something. There is an irony in "Cloth easily forgets the whispers of fantasy", because the stain is itself a kind of memory. The cloth forgets the words but keeps the blood.
The ending moves from present tense to past: "She kissed the wall gently." The shift makes it feel like a confession told afterwards. The wall now stands in for two people, the lost woman for him and the old man for her. "The closest she ever came to honesty" is a painful line, because her one honest act is still indirect, "Touching him vicariously". The longest, most drawn-out word in the poem arrives at the very end, as though the sentence is reluctant to stop.
The form supports this. The poem is free verse, with no stanza breaks, no rhyme and no end punctuation. Sentences leak across line breaks the way whispers run together. Its repeated sounds do the work rhyme usually does. "Whispering", "whispered" and "whispers" return like a refrain, and the soft s-sounds of "sweet nothings" and "stone apparition" keep the volume low. The last lines end on the gentle, unstressed chime of "gently", "honesty" and "vicariously". The line lengths are uneven, and short, hard fragments like "Cracked like an old scab" cut into the longer, drifting ones.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it turns an almost absurd image into an uncomfortable triangle of longing. Each person loves someone who cannot receive it, and the wall is the only surface where their feelings meet. It also leaves a question open. If he treats a wall as a person, is she, in her own way, loving a wall too?