Before anything has happened, the speaker already knows how the evening will end. Everything is in the future tense: "I will make my way," "we'll remain," "a loneliness will prevail." The poem describes a visit to someone the speaker has clearly seen before, since the stranded word "again" gives the game away. Wine, talk, laughter and probably sex are laid out like a script, and the poem's central idea is that closeness can be performed perfectly well without ever closing the gap between two people. The body arrives and the conversation flows, but the loneliness is still there. It is "too vast to measure."
The structure is a frame. The poem opens with "Why do we do this to ourselves?" and closes with "Why do we do this to each other?" The change from "ourselves" to "each other" matters. At the start, the pain seems private and self-inflicted, a bad habit. By the end the speaker admits that the harm passes between the two of them, and that it is shared. The question is never answered. It simply comes round a second time, which suits a poem about repetition.
The most striking image is the garden. While the pair drink wine indoors, "twilight will silently deny / colour to the flowers of your garden." It is a quiet, almost cinematic moment, with colour draining out of the world as the light fails. The verb "deny" is the interesting choice. It makes the fading feel like a withholding rather than a natural event, and it hints at what the two people are denying themselves. The speaker then adds that "inside, we'll remain ignorant / of all this," so the fading outside works as a mirror the couple refuse to look into. They sense only "some ineffable sense of / absence." The word "ineffable" means too great to be put into words, yet the poem is busy putting it into words. That tension, between what the lovers won't say and what the poem is saying for them, drives the whole piece.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular beat. Instead it relies on line breaks and spacing. "Again" and "absence" are pushed to the right, so they hang off the edge of their stanzas as if the speaker's voice has trailed away. The word "perhaps" gets the same treatment, a wide gap of white space around it, which makes the plan for the night feel hesitant just before it turns blunt: "we'll fuck." After the soft, drifting "perhaps," that short, flat word lands without decoration. The poem does not romanticise the sex or hide it behind a metaphor. The following line, "It'll be fun," is almost shrugging, and it sets up the "but" that undoes it.
Small details of punctuation add to this casual, unguarded tone. The ampersands in "talk & / drink wine" and "we / know" give the speech a quick, informal, almost text-message feel, as if the speaker were jotting these thoughts down rather than polishing them. In the stanza that runs "as we talk & laugh. / drink wine & then," a full stop and a lowercase letter break the rhythm slightly. It reads like a stumble, a sentence that can't quite keep its footing, though that is my reading of the effect and the poem doesn't confirm it.
The ending is the most ambiguous part. "We / know that it won't last forever." What is "it"? It could be the distance, the loneliness, the meetings themselves, or the relationship. The poem leaves the pronoun open, and each reading changes the mood. If the loneliness won't last, there is a faint comfort. If the meetings won't last, the evening becomes more poignant. The colon before "The distance between us" is also worth noticing, because it promises an explanation and delivers only a fact that can't be measured.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it pretends. It doesn't blame anyone, and it doesn't offer a cure. It shows two people choosing, with their eyes open, something they know will hurt, and its title, "What we do," treats that choice as both a habit and a confession.