The poem opens with a puzzle it never quite solves: "A painting of a smile within a painting of a girl." One image sits inside another, and we are left wondering how much of a face is the person and how much is the expression fixed onto her. By the end the smile has gone, replaced by a mouth that is "a straight line," and the speaker, who began by looking at an image, is feeling a real will press on him. That move from representation to presence seems to me the poem's central idea.
The first scene is cold and fragmentary. "Eyes have known pain, / Flesh, flesh" is almost a stammer, as if the words can't get past the body. Then the body breaks into parts. A "ringed hand" lifts a cup to "cratered lips," and the wine passes through a "wordless orifice," a deliberately clinical phrase that strips the woman of personality. She is "a body of no one's knowing." The hand then "chops down" and the cup "explodes," a burst of violence in an otherwise still room. "Silence follows" gets a line to itself, so the reader sits in that silence too. Back across the room, the painting "smiles / Or perhaps it is a painting of a smile," and the second thought undoes the first.
Next comes a flash of memory: "Outside, many years ago, / A light storm. / Her face. / Fingers clawed the clay." These lines are almost without verbs and arrive one at a time, like snapshots. "Clay" is ambiguous. It could be wet earth in a storm, a sculptor's material, or the body itself as something moulded. The poem doesn't say which, and that fits its habit of leaving things unsettled.
The middle section widens into something almost cosmic. Dawn dims "cold photon fire" thrown off by "rusted wheels of trains," so light and rusty machinery sit in one image. The speaker walks "through Hilbert space," a mathematical term for an abstract, infinite realm, yet "Infinity" is "glued to my skin," as if the abstract had become something sticky and bodily. "God gambles at my feet with a Roman / For my seemless word" seems to echo soldiers casting lots for a garment at a crucifixion. The misspelling "seemless" may be a deliberate pun, suggesting both "seamless" and a word stripped of "seeming." That is an inference, but it suits a poem so concerned with appearances. The speaker's cry of "Out!" comes "with vanished desire," a paradox that shows how thoroughly feeling has drained away. Darkness "creeps backwards / Facing the Dawn and bowing now and then," an oddly polite retreat. Soon the speaker is "Strangling softly, strangely," where the soft *s* sounds make the choking quiet and almost tender.
Then the poem narrows again to a single figure. The woman appears "Silhouetted lightly on a tall cliff," a flat dark shape like a painted figure, but this one moves. Her arms rise and fall "To some percussion in my head," so she seems to conduct a rhythm only the speaker hears. "An alien familiarity" sums up the whole poem in three words: this is someone he knows and yet cannot know, much like the earlier "body of no one's knowing." Her raised eyebrows and straight mouth answer the painted smile with something more severe and more alive.
The ending is plain. "I can feel it now more than before. / It is her intention." The language relaxes into simple statements, as if the speaker has finally stopped searching for grand images. We never learn what she intends, only that it can be felt.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. Line lengths swing from one-word stanzas to full sentences, and the white space does the work of pauses. What makes it worth reading is how it joins a painter's still image, a physicist's vocabulary and a half-biblical scene to describe something small and human, the pressure of another person's mind. It leaves the question about the smile open, but it makes clear that a real person is never fully contained by an image of her.