A couple's ending is told here in three short movements, and by the last one the story has quietly turned into a confession. The poem never names its lovers or says where they are. We get a man, a woman, a doorway and a drink offered too late. What lingers is less the breakup than the question the final lines raise: what becomes of a person who loves and admires everything?
The first stanza moves from heat to numbness. "She left his skin on fire" is an opening of pure sensation, but by the end he cannot feel at all: his hands are "insensate to her flesh." Between those points comes the poem's smallest and most telling moment. Her words tumble out in "a skeletal gasping wish," and what she asks is "now won't you have a little / something before you go?" The line is indented, as if pushed away from the narration, and its hostess politeness sounds painfully tiny beside the burning that came before. The man's exit, "he took his penitent leave," picks up her "go" and dresses it in religious language, as though desire were something to be sorry for.
The second stanza turns to her, and the vocabulary grows strange and overdressed. She watches "the parched rain," an oxymoron for weather that fails to relieve anything. The "despondent damp avenue" then wipes "all truth and willingness" from her face. "Expunged" is a clerk's word, as if feeling were being struck from a record. Her "tortured affected features" are worth pausing on, since "affected" can mean moved or can mean put on, and the poem won't say which. The comedy is deliberate. She weighs "the mingy number of his talents" like an auditor, then grants him "abstract worth in the masculine declination." Declination can suggest a downward slope, a polite refusal, or even grammar's declensions. The grand phrasing makes her verdict sound both final and slightly absurd.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. Lines begin in lower case, and the only punctuation mark of note is the question mark in her invitation. Without rhyme to lean on, the poem relies on texture, such as the clustered t-sounds of "tumbled," "tortured" and "temptations," or the d-d-d of "despondent damp." Short lines like "he took his penitent leave" land with a thud against the longer, more tangled sentences around them. Across the poem the sensations drain away: fire, then numbness, then rain that is somehow both dry and wet.
The third stanza begins as comedy and ends as something harder. "She never took him anyplace / he hadn't already been before" is a deflating complaint, suggesting a relationship that only circled familiar ground. Then the indented lines take over. "Rescue me from certainty / and leave me not to my temptations" bends the shape of the Lord's Prayer, though not its meaning. The speaker wants rescue from certainty, not from evil, which makes certainty the real danger. The poem doesn't say who is speaking, and it could be either lover or the poem's own voice. Whoever it is, the ornate diction drops away for the last line, which is plain and almost conversational: "the problem with always loving and / admiring everything and everyone is / you never figure out who you really are."
That plainness is where the poem earns its weight. Judging by the text, the problem isn't cruelty or betrayal but a kind of indiscriminate enthusiasm. A person who admires everything never has to choose, and a person who never chooses may never discover a self. Read this way, the earlier scenes become a portrait of two people performing feeling at each other, with polite offers, affected faces and tallied talents, while the real question stays unasked.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so few lines. It is funny and sad together, and it lets the gap between lofty words and small events stand in for the gap between what people feel and what they manage to say. It leaves us with an uncomfortable thought, that warmth toward everyone can be a way of hiding from yourself.