Lunch is still at work. That is the quiet joke the poem opens with: the soup "continues to bubble," as if the speaker's stomach were a pot left on a low flame. Everything around it is calm and a little drab, with "fog & rain" outside and a speaker "sitting straight in my chair / reading from a screen." Then a gurgle interrupts, and for a moment the speaker can't tell where it comes from. The drainpipe is gargling rain, and the body, judging by the lines, is gargling soup. The central idea lives in that confusion. The borders we assume between inside and outside, self and world, can go soft, and the poem suggests we might even want them to.
The form is as unfussy as the scene. This is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, and its short lines sit close to ordinary speech. The ampersands ("fog & rain," "& when I hear a gurgle") give the voice a casual, typed-on-a-keyboard feel, which suits a speaker reading from a screen. The line breaks do quiet work too. "Reading from a screen" ends its line and then the sentence swerves, so the gurgle arrives as a small interruption. The words themselves are wet and bubbling: "bubble," "gurgle," "drainpipe." The b and g sounds make the stanza sound like what it describes.
Posture matters here. The speaker is "sitting straight," upright and composed, absorbed in text, almost a picture of being oriented in the world. The gurgle pulls that tidy figure back into the body and the weather. The hinge comes in the stanza's last three lines: "unsure for a moment / whether the soup is in me / or I am in the soup." The mirrored phrasing makes the swap feel natural, as though neither answer were wrong. "In the soup" is also an old idiom for being in a muddle, and English has long called a thick fog a "pea-souper." So the fog outside and the broth inside begin to look like the same substance. The whole afternoon turns into a kind of stock.
The second stanza changes mode. The first told an anecdote, and this one makes a wish: "I would like a recipe / for disorientation, / a map for getting lost." The politeness of "I would like" is funny, as if disorientation could be ordered from a menu. Recipes and maps are both instruction genres, so the speaker is asking for instructions on how to lose one's instructions. The poem then supplies the recipe, and its verbs are chosen with care. "Dissolve / each point of reference" works two ways. Dissolving is something you do in a kitchen, and a point of reference is a landmark, the thing a map depends on. To dissolve it is to cook and to lose your bearings at once. "Bring to a boil" follows, brisk and obedient, like a real recipe.
The last line, "Take stock," is the best pun in the poem. Stock is the liquid base of a soup, so it belongs in the recipe. But to take stock is also to pause and assess where you stand, which is exactly what a lost person must do. The line is short and clipped, ending on a hard k after all the soft liquid sounds, and it lands like a lid on the pot. It can be read as a joke, or as a small answer. After every reference point has dissolved, what remains is whatever you can still count.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. Nothing happens except a drainpipe, a stomach and a moment of confusion, yet the speaker treats that confusion as a gift rather than a problem. In a life of screens and maps, where being located and informed is the default, the poem makes a quietly radical request to be allowed to get lost, even to the point of not knowing whether you are the one eating the soup or the one being eaten by it. It makes that request with a smile, and the humor is what lets the idea go down so easily.