Waking at four in the morning, the speaker is caught in that sleepless hour when the mind turns to bookkeeping. The title, "Invoice," frames the night as a reckoning: "I even accounts / with myself," a bent phrase that makes the settling-up feel strange and a little off-balance, as if tiredness has loosened the grammar too.
The images that follow are bleak and slightly dreamlike. Heads "roll / like ice on the shore" suggests something cold, loose, and drifting, while the comparison to "the poor in / their warren" hints at crowding, hardship, and lives with little room to turn. The speaker then asks, "Where / is the house I forgot?", which reads like a nagging sense of something lost or left behind, though the poem doesn't say what. The last line, lighting a room "to scare away sleep," is odd and telling: the speaker seems to choose wakefulness, perhaps to avoid dreams or to keep thinking. The mood is uneasy, lonely, and quietly restless.