The speaker addresses the ghost of Hart Crane, and the setting is startlingly mundane: a public restroom with a row of cubicles. The rustle of toilet paper seems to call the ghost back. He paces, tries the doors, and pretends to look for a nickel, as though he were cruising or killing time. Then the automatic flush goes off and sends him "back into your drowning." Anyone who knows that Crane died by drowning will hear the grim joke in that line, though the poem works even without that knowledge, since the flush itself becomes a small, repeated act of drowning.
The speaker's tone shifts at the end. He asks the ghost to "stay back there & forget me," which sounds tender and weary at once. He seems to want to spare Crane another round of being summoned and swept away, and perhaps to spare himself too. The mood is bleak, darkly comic, and oddly gentle. The poem's final image, a stillness "baited with fresh rustlings," suggests the cycle is about to start again.