Listen to how the poem opens: one sentence, stretched over four lines, carrying a flute's sound from somewhere far off into the listeners' ears and eyes. The shakuhachi is a Japanese bamboo flute, and Mike Stone gives it a breathy, unhurried presence, a "wordless breathing" that arrives "from beyond midnight." The verb is a small surprise. The flute "flutes down the path," as though the instrument has become an action, a current of sound with its own road. That road is "pale green radiance," and the senses begin to blur. Sound becomes something seen and enters "our ears and eyes" together. Before anything happens, the poem has told us that ordinary boundaries are about to give way.
After that long sentence the poem seems to run out of breath, and it does so on purpose. "Hours reflected in wine." "Hands touching silence." Each gets a line to itself, surrounded by white space, and neither has a main verb. The participles hang in the air. Time becomes something you can see on the surface of a glass, and silence becomes something you can touch. Then "Towards dawn" trails off without a full stop, a night dissolving rather than ending. The poem has no rhyme and no regular beat. Its rhythm is that of breathing, phrases of different lengths separated by pauses, much like the music it describes.
The gong stanza swells the lines again. Its vibrations "floated down in waves that overlapped each other / In vast complexities," and the line break does what the sound does, with one line spilling into the next. "Vast complexities" is abstract and a little grand, which suits sounds too many to name. Then comes the plainest, most physical moment in the poem: "We felt a wetness spring between our cheeks." The word "spring" makes the tears sound like water rising from the ground rather than something anyone chose to produce. "Between our cheeks" suggests two faces pressed close. The poem's liquids, the wine and now the tears, quietly echo each other. Then the key admission: "One of us cried / I did not know who." The closeness is so complete that the speaker cannot tell whose tears they are.
What follows is a fall. "As if we had violated the universe / We were cast apart." The "as if" matters. Nobody says they did anything wrong. The feeling is of having come too near to something, as though such merging were forbidden and the cosmos answered with punishment. The ending is a single drawn-out sentence: "Until we stood in the world / Now separated by a hyperspace of time." "Hyperspace" sounds like the vocabulary of science fiction or physics, a space with extra dimensions, and pairing it with "time" makes a distance that no one can walk across. The small word "Now" shifts the poem from past to present. The night is told in the past tense, but the separation is still going on. Judging by the wine, the touching hands and the shared tears, the "we" are probably lovers, though the poem never says so.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it acts out its own subject. Its lines flow, fragment, swell and break, and it ends not with a resolution but with a long line stretched across a gap. It suggests that the most intense moments of shared feeling, whether stirred by music or by love, cannot be carried back into daily life, and that what is lost is not only a person but a way of being. The restraint helps. There are no names, no explanation of who "we" are and no blame. That keeps the poem from sentimentality and leaves the reader in the speaker's own uncertainty: "I did not know who."