The poem opens on a feeling of fading: eyes that "go thinly," time pressing in, light "backing up on us." The speaker looks at the crowd of people moving through the world, each one displacing air as if the space belonged to them, and then admits she does the same. That small turn is the heart of it. She sees herself as one more body claiming room it has no real right to.
The "outrageous dream of symmetry" suggests a wish for order or balance, but the poem cracks it right away. What replaces it is a world of "signs" and "crumbling habit," where routines wear down. By the end the bodies are on their knees, bent out of shape, and when they lift their heads their necks "snap." The movement feels painful and exposed.
The mood is uneasy and bare, but the last image, bodies "washed / in the moon's curve," adds a strange, quiet calm, as if something larger lightly covers all the strain.