Nobody in love looks cool for long, and Nathaniel S. Rounds seems to know it. His speaker keeps announcing that he still burns, and the poem is a quick, funny, slightly rueful portrait of a person who cannot stop wanting someone. Its central idea is that desire outlasts the poses we build against it. The speaker may be older or wiser now, or may simply think he ought to be, but the flame has not gone out.
The first stanza sets this up through one neat piece of comedy. "Ray-Ban eyes melt in heat from / Your hot-sun-heart." Sunglasses are made to protect us from the sun, and they belong to a certain idea of cool, with hidden eyes and a guarded face. Here the protection fails. The other person is the sun, a "hot-sun-heart" welded into one word, and the speaker's armor goes soft. The hyphens make the phrase feel breathless, as if he can't stop to separate the words. The verb "rise" in "I still rise over youthful flame" is also worth noticing. It can suggest smoke, a sunrise, or something more bodily, and the poem leaves all three in play.
Then comes the image that gives the poem its personality: "I still dance like a limberjack." A limberjack is a jointed wooden toy that jerks and clatters when it is tapped. That is a funny way to describe himself, and a humbling one. The speaker is not a graceful dancer but a puppet, and a puppet does not choose its movements. It follows whatever rhythm is tapped out for it. The flame has a "tongue" that "tickles," which turns danger into mischief, so the burning is half pain and half pleasure. The line is flirtatious and a little cheeky, and the lightness keeps the poem from sounding like a standard lament.
The ending deepens the mood. "Gonna be a man some day" is slangy and self-mocking, and it sits oddly beside the repeated "still." Judging by the voice, he may be a young man promising to grow up, or someone who has put off growing up for as long as this feeling has lasted. The poem doesn't say which, and the uncertainty is part of its charm. What he can say for sure is that "for now I dance to a torch song." A torch song is a ballad of unrequited or lingering love, and the phrase also plays on the old idea of "carrying a torch." Fire is the poem's main metaphor, and here it returns as music. The last line gives the song its own will: it "keeps calling your name." The speaker doesn't summon the memory. It summons him.
The form suits that sense of being pulled along. The poem is in free verse, with short lines and plenty of white space, and the single-line stanzas read like beats in a song. "I still burn for you" works as a chorus, opening the poem and returning at the midpoint, and "I still" repeats like a drum pattern. There is no regular rhyme scheme, which makes the one clear rhyme more striking. "Flame," near the start, comes back as "name" in the final line, so the poem begins with fire and ends with the beloved's name, the two bound together. Smaller sound effects support the tone: the stuttering t's of "tongue tickles," and the h's of "hot-sun-heart," which nearly pant.
The title, "House of Myrrh," adds another layer. Myrrh is a resin that is burned as incense and has also been used in embalming. As an inference, the title suggests a place where things are burned slowly and fragrantly, where devotion and loss are mixed together. That fits a speaker whose love is both a ritual and a slow burn.
The poem is worth reading because it is so compact and so honest. In a handful of lines it manages comedy, tenderness and ache without settling on any one of them. It borrows from older traditions, the torch song and the burning heart, but gives them a modern wink through Ray-Bans and slang. The result is a love poem that admits how silly love can make us look and doesn't pretend that makes it any less real.