Dave Bonta looks at the nipple through a series of quick, surprising comparisons, and the effect is to make a familiar part of the body feel strange and a little awe-inspiring. It is a mouthpiece, like the part of a wind instrument you blow into, and its silence is described as "another language," as if the body speaks without words. Then it becomes a mountain peak that "makes its own wet weather," a nice image of how something small can seem to have its own climate.
The speaker's tone is curious and tender rather than erotic or clinical. The nipple is "mouse-pink" and as sensitive as a newborn's, even in old age, which suggests a lasting vulnerability. The last images dive deeper: a "missed bit of a continent" lost in the unconscious, and a scuba diver who "can't speak." The poem returns to "mouthpiece," so the silence now feels like being underwater. The mood is quiet, playful, and a bit mysterious.