Nothing in "Dragon of Space" ever mentions a dragon, and that absence is the first puzzle. The speaker sits in "the room farther away / than a window", a place so remote that even the view out of it feels out of reach. What the poem gives us instead is a huge, sleeping wall that "feeds on dark air". Judging by the imagery, this may be the dragon: a vast presence that doesn't attack, only looms and consumes. The speaker's situation is a standoff with something that hasn't moved, and perhaps never will unless she does.
At its heart the poem is about the paralysis that sits between wanting and risking. Desire is clearly present. There is "the mouth / of desire", a "that other body" being warmed into fever, and a "black-longing fire" waiting beyond the door. Yet the speaker's final line is "but I do not move". It is the only "but" in the poem, and it arrives like a door closing. Loneliness here is not simply something that happens to her. It is partly the result of her own stillness, a choice made again and again.
That repetition is the poem's backbone. "And I am alone" returns five times, first without the "and", then as a steady, flat refrain. Everything else in the poem is strange and fragmented, but this line is plain and complete. Each return acts like a pulse, or like someone pressing on a bruise to check it still hurts. The poem has no stanza breaks and no punctuation, so the refrain does the work of dividing it into sections. Each time, the poem has wandered into a new image and then been dragged back to the same fact.
Between the refrains, the syntax keeps breaking. "Taken of myself" is an odd phrase that suggests being emptied, or robbed of one's own self. "Cross-steps / reach the other / side is all I must" never finishes. We can guess it means "all I must do is cross to the other side", but the sentence stops short, as if the speaker cannot complete the thought of crossing. The line breaks cut the same way. "Turn away turn / through the knitted door" repeats its verb, so the speaker seems to stumble over the idea of leaving before she has even left. The grammar stays as stuck as she is.
The imagery works by warping space and time. She can "dissolve rocks under / my naked eyes", so her gaze is strong enough to wear down stone, and still she can't cross a room. The wall is "cornered aslant", a skewed geometry in which nothing sits square. Light is "prisoned", then "slow", then "more slowly twined / with breathing", and the comparative stretches the moment further each time. Even the verb in "fevers that other body" is unexpected, since "fever" is turned from a noun into something one body does to another. The most striking image is the "knitted door". Knitting is soft, domestic and handmade, so the barrier is woven, not iron. It could be pushed through easily, and that is what makes her stillness so telling. The "black-longing fire" is an oxymoron in the same spirit, a fire that is dark and a longing that burns. On the other side of the door, desire and danger are indistinguishable.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is irregular, built from short lines that lean on one another through enjambment. What holds it together is sound. The long "o" of "alone" rings through the poem, and the slow vowels and soft consonants of "slow light more slowly twined" make the reader's own reading speed drop. Words like "still" and "deep" settle like weights.
What makes the poem worth studying is how it turns an inner state into architecture. Fear, longing and solitude become a room, a wall, a door and a fire, and the reader is placed inside them. The poem also withholds any release. The speaker never falls into the fire and never walks away. It ends exactly where it began, on the same words, which suggests that the loneliest thing in the poem is not the dark or the dragon but the unbroken sameness of the choice not to move.