The speaker keeps phoning a person who never picks up. Instead, the dog answers, then the parrot, and once the fish, whose circling in the aquarium seems to pass through the speaker's ear like "fossils of your tongue." The household has stayed, but the person who made it a home has gone, and only animals are left to stand in for a voice.
The parenthetical instructions are the strangest part. They tell us where the words should be said: in a bar's sudden silence, on a lazy Sunday, on a streetcorner at night after the bus has gone. Each is a moment of emptiness, when absence is easiest to feel. Near the end, the speaker says they have "inhabited our bodies" and shared rooms, which suggests the loss is tied to physical closeness. The mood is quiet, tender and a little haunted. The final instruction, to recite it "slowly and with care," reads like grief handled gently.