An old man stands before a brick wall and treats it as the woman he lost. The bricks match the color of her lips, and he presses his trembling fingers into them, whispering to a memory that can't answer. The poem suggests his love has hardened into something stony and one-sided, a "misplaced love" he can only direct at an object.
Then a second figure appears. She cleans the blood from his fingers one by one, gently, as if to undo the damage his devotion does to him. But the cloth she uses ends up stained, and the poem says cloth "easily forgets," hinting that her care leaves no lasting mark on him. In the last lines she kisses the wall herself, which the poem calls the closest she gets to honesty, and she touches him only indirectly through it.
The mood is tender but bleak. Everyone loves through a stand-in, and nobody quite reaches the person they want.