Intriguing, IT ... especially the one you chose but also the ones MA has added to the 'palette' ... And indeed by the time I got to the Face to FAce one in combo with this one, it started to feel/read like Salvador Dali as poetry, to a certain extent.... a feeling of dream-like merging, blurring, stretching, blending ... I wonder if the last stanza here intends to keep alive the simile of the second stanza ... regarding the watercolor schoolboy painting ... (plausibly a memory of the poet's own, given that he specified school'boy'?) ... In such a painting of blurring colors, the houses would "approach" and conceivably create the expressionless throng ... Just a thought ... While I initially and still mostly read this as a "They" coming from inside the couple's own perspective, despite the third-person omniscient narration angle, it does occur to me that the poem could be from the point of view of a voyeur, looking from outside at the hotel they are in ... I get this possibility mostly from "Then up" - so it's not a pov that I feel throughout the poem and therefore is still more of a longshot 'side' interpretation. The word that 'got' me the most upon first read was "quenched" - while it stopped my flow of reading to ponder what a "quenched window" would be/mean/entail - it was a stoppage that seemed fruitful and engaging not disengaging as when an "off" word throws a reader off track ... Yet it's still a curious word choice to me - in what way can a window be like thirst, such that it could be 'quenched' in a way thirst can be quenched? That too COULD suggest a voyeur pov ... but it could also be a signal that there are multiple windows like this in the town, each shut down from outside view and with the inhabitants inside those windows retiring from a day's thirst - including ebbing passions that may have been captured in the "movements of love" ... As I write this last part, I'm also feeling an echo of e.e. cummings - perhaps only because of "anyone lived in a pretty how town" but somehow my brain synapses lapsed into cummings as being evoked for me here as well as Dali ... I do think the poem is ultimately about "most secret thoughts" - and its imagery meanders through realms of hidden mergings of spirits and bodies ... I'd never heard of Transtromer and so for that reason as well, appreciate the choice, IT ... not surfacing much these days from a ramped-up workload but glad to drop in on some intriguing fare here ... and sending greetings to you and all ... z