Who Will Do The Kissing - Analysis

A conversation that keeps missing itself

This tiny poem reads like the remnant of a longer exchange: we arrive too late, and the speaker knows it. The opening sentence, You will not have heard that, doesn’t tell us what that is; it only announces a failure of communication. The line sounds at once casual and slightly reprimanding, as if the speaker is correcting the listener’s timeline: news has happened, but not for you. The central claim the poem keeps implying is that intimacy depends on being present at the right moment, and here everyone is out of sync.

The tone is dry and oddly polite, but it keeps jolting into new topics as if the speaker can’t settle. What about the leftover duck? lands with comic domesticity: a detail of dinner, of care, of what remains when an event is over. Yet it also feels like a substitute topic, something you ask when you can’t ask the real thing. The poem’s tension begins there: hunger and tenderness are both in the room, but neither is addressed directly.

Kissing assigned like a chore

The title question and the third line, Who will do the kissing?, makes desire sound bureaucratic, almost logistical, like someone has to be appointed. That phrasing turns affection into a task, which is funny, but it’s also faintly sad: it suggests nobody is naturally stepping forward. The poem sets up a contradiction between what kissing usually implies (spontaneous closeness) and what this line implies (an absence so complete it must be managed).

Ice skating: the elegant exit

The final line, They have gone ice skating, is a quiet turn away from the speaker’s questions. Instead of answering about the duck or the kissing, it delivers a disappearance: they are gone, gliding somewhere else. Ice skating carries a social brightness, a smoothness, even romance, but it’s also literally slippery; it fits a world where connection can’t get traction. The poem ends with the speaker left with leftovers and unanswered intimacy, while the others move as a group—remote, graceful, and unreachable.