At a garden party, the hosts have buried TVs in the yard, their screens hissing static up out of the grass. The speaker and the other guests drink cheap beer and treat the scene half as a joke, half as something eerie. The TVs are compared to oracles, as if the buried screens might be speaking from underground, though what they say is unreadable.
A young woman who seems to be on drugs starts to cry. The speaker, trying to comfort her, says the static looks like dancing, not fighting. She answers with something stranger and more precise: it's background radiation and thermal noise, and reality is beautiful. The speaker, a bit out of his depth, crouches to look closer.
The poem's date, 1990, matters. The speaker mentions the end of the Cold War and a coming war, so the news feels loud and unstable. Against that, the static seems oddly honest. The mood is wry, dreamy and slightly unsettled, and the final toast is both sincere and ironic.