The speaker dreams of his dead mother, and the dream is grotesque. She died of cancer, and she comes back with bandaged, glowing legs, a loose housecoat, and a giggling, shameless manner, keeping company with other dead people as they wander a "city of graves." He calls her a "whore," and the word shows how shocked and unsettled he is by what sleep has done to her image.
The details are physical and hard to look at: her belly like a "wrinkled buddha's face winking," the soiled rayon, the "crawling pelt." Yet her eyes are the "brightest," and the poem hints that dreams strip away the mind's defences and give back strange "gifts." Her final speech, praising syphilis and its rot, mixes disease, desire and death together. The mood is disturbing, morbid and darkly intimate. The speaker seems caught between horror, grief and a fascination he can't shake, as if illness and death have turned his mother into someone he must look at but cannot comfortably recognise.