The title, "Aphasia," points to the loss of language, and the poem seems to enact that loss as it goes. The speaker describes a slow, fading rhythm that leaves the feeling that nothing more can be said. Then comes a flat, oddly cheerful line, "She buys more socks," where the shift to the present tense is offered as a cure, though it only papers over a gloomy, empty space. The poem suggests someone close to the speaker is declining, with "a slowness" and fatigue, a word the speaker calls a "generous euphemism."
The images feel disconnected: thickets, a blazer, tattered belongings, grinning yoyos on the horizon. That scattered quality seems deliberate, as if sentences keep breaking off, like the "tag ends of arguments aimed at nothing." The mood is weary, wry, and quietly sad. The speaker uses dry humor to avoid saying the painful thing outright, and the strange final image leaves us with something bright but meaningless.