Dave Bonta's poem reads like a handful of images dropped side by side, and the pleasure is in how oddly they fit. Two people, it seems, sit together wearing hats, with "paying hips" and a "glad work" that might comfort "poor seamen." The phrasing is playful and a little puzzling. Hips that pay and work that pleases sailors hint at labor and exchange, though the poem never spells out what kind.
What comes through clearly is the speaker's gladness. They are glad to sit, glad to be in bed, glad even though the weather is strange. Then the season itself turns confusing: it is winter, yet there are dust, flies, and rosebushes full of leaves, things that belong to a warmer, drier time. The title, "The floating world," suits that sense of everything slightly unmoored.
The mood is warm but dreamlike, a contented drifting. The speaker seems to accept a world out of order and find comfort in simply being still inside it.