Six short lines carry a quietly bleak idea about desire: whatever we want slips away from us one way or another. The speaker begins with a plain loss. What they miss, they never find. But finding doesn't help either, because what they find, they eat, and eating destroys it. The speaker calls this "an essential tragedy," as though it's built into how wanting works. To have something is to use it up.
The last two lines turn softer and stranger. Things the speaker takes, they talk to, late at night in an "unquiet bed." Possession seems to leave only a kind of conversation with objects, or perhaps with memories, in the dark.
The tone is spare, dry, and a little wry, but underneath it sits restlessness and loneliness. The speaker sounds like someone who keeps reaching for things and can never feel settled, lying awake with whatever they've managed to hold onto.