Before it says anything, the poem has already lost something. It opens on a lowercase "bare back." as if we have walked in halfway through a thought, and the later stanzas begin the same way. "The chair in the livingroom" picks up a sentence that stopped on the word "between." "To meet you after work" has no subject and no main verb to hang from. Whether the gaps are deliberate or not, the effect is that of a memory with pieces missing: a few vivid things survive, and the connecting tissue has gone.
What survives is a mix of the intimate and the ordinary. A bare back, "thighs cool and soft," suggest physical closeness. But the sentence runs on, across the stanza break, to land not on a person but on "the chair in the livingroom, the cup / from the kitchen, and the unforgettable tv." The body is wedged among household objects. The word "unforgettable" is the funniest and saddest moment here. A television is the most forgettable thing in a room, yet it is the object the speaker says will stay. Meanwhile the person we might expect to be unforgettable is never described at all. "You" appears only as someone who "was late," defined by absence.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no steady meter, just free verse that swings between very short and very long units. "bare back." is two stressed syllables and a full stop, blunt as a snapshot. The middle sentence stretches out in a list. Then the last line shrinks again to "I sat down," three plain monosyllables. Some consonants carry the poem along quietly: the hard *c* sound runs through "chair," "cup," "Couches," "Capitol," and "cushions," so the domestic and the civic are tied together by sound before they are tied together by image. "Cool and soft," by contrast, is gentle and slow, and it sets the tone for the cushioned world that takes over at the end.
The last image is the strangest and the best. "Couches surrounded the Old Capitol Building / like a haze with cushions." A capitol suggests government and public history, something solid and official. Here it is swamped by living-room furniture, and the simile turns the couches into weather, a haze you could sink into. That fits the title, which offers "yeast" and "cloud dust." Judging by the imagery, yeast suggests things swelling and rising, dust suggests what settles on old furniture and old memories, and a cloud blurs the edges of everything. The title gathers the poem's atmosphere into one phrase: soft, puffed up, slightly dreamlike, a little dirty.
Notice also how the poem moves from private to public. It begins inside a body, moves to a room, and ends outdoors in front of a large building, but the comfort of the living room follows the speaker out. Home furnishings have spread over the whole landscape, as if the speaker cannot stop seeing the world through the soft, passive habits of domestic life. That may be why the final reaction to being stood up is not anger or pacing but "I sat down." The speaker does not protest the lateness. They give in to the cushions and join the furniture.
It is hard to say the poem is "about" one thing, and that is part of its interest. It could be read as a love poem in which the beloved has dissolved into things, or as a poem about waiting, or about how memory preserves the wrong details. The chair, the cup, and the television stay while the person fades. The poem does not explain which reading is right. Its significance lies in how much it makes from so little: a few short fragments, one odd comparison, and a closing gesture of surrender. It asks the reader to do what the speaker does, which is to sit in the gap and notice what is still there.