The woman's one question arrives without a question mark: "Tell me why it cannot be she asked him." Everything after that is his answer, with no quotation marks, so the narrator's voice slides into his and we end up inside his reasoning. Mike Stone's "Approach-Avoidance" takes its title from psychology, where the phrase describes wanting something and fearing it at the same moment. The poem acts that out. A man explains why he cannot be with his lover while asking to hold her one more time.
The first lines show how he argues. "Come to me and let me hold you one more time" is pure approach. Eight lines later comes "But you know I could not leave her," which is pure avoidance. Between them he keeps reassuring both of them that nothing will happen. "Innocently I'll kiss your forehead," he promises, and then undercuts himself in a parenthesis: "Like your quick kisses on my cheek (but then my lips)." The brackets work like a slip of the tongue. His memory runs ahead of his promise and shows where an innocent kiss has gone before. When he returns to the word at the end, asking for "one more kiss of innocence," the repetition sounds less like reassurance than like a man talking himself into it.
His vocabulary of guilt is just as revealing. "The sin was never in your giving, but my taking" is the neatest sentence in the poem, balanced like a confession. He blames himself, but the symmetry also lets him sound honourable. Then desire interrupts the argument. He explains that "It would not have worked for us," and the example he gives is an embrace: "I'd enfold your hips / With entwined arms till death undid them." The phrase "till death" echoes the wedding vow, as if the language of marriage has migrated to the affair. A few lines later the vow comes home. "Long ago I promised we'd be buried side by side," he says, and the line has the steady, chant-like rhythm of a promise, helped by the doubled "side by side."
The poem sets the two relationships in different imagery. The lover is body: hips, arms, lips. The long partnership is air and time: "We've breathed so long together / It's hard to know where one leaves off and other begins." The word "leaves" here is quietly important, because the poem is full of leaving. He "could not leave her," the two of them blur at the point where one "leaves off," and walking away would be like trying "to pack my bags and leave the universe." That last image sets a small domestic act, packing a suitcase, against something cosmic. It sounds almost comic until you realise he means it literally. Without her, he feels, there would be no world to step into.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and lines that stretch and shorten like speech. Sentences stop and restart, and "Sharing tears for common memories" is a fragment with no main verb, as if he can only point at the shared past rather than build a sentence around it. The ending is the sharpest piece of craft. "Just one more kiss of innocence, please / Let me go." The short last line can be read two ways. He may be begging her to release him, or he may be asking permission to go on. It also mirrors the opening request, "let me hold you." The poem begins with "let me hold" and ends with "let me go," and he seems unable to do either cleanly.
That is why the poem is worth reading. It has no villain and no resolution, only a speaker who sees his own situation clearly, blames himself in good phrases, and still reaches back for one more moment. The unpunctuated opening question gets a long reply that never quite answers it. The form carries the indecision as well as the content, and the poem leaves us wondering whether the goodbye will ever actually happen.