The poem moves from a small, ordinary moment to something much bigger and colder. It begins with a cough in a coffee house, and the speaker's fear at that sound suggests a world where illness feels close and every body seems fragile. From there, the images turn strange. The poorest body is imagined as a winter, then as something "made of a hundred fish / with snow at the bottom," a dreamlike picture of a body that is cold, crowded and quietly sinking.
The middle of the poem gets eerier. The dead "come to life" with flesh "hollow as wax," and they live inside the violence of the winds, as if the season itself were haunted. The ending is bleak but tender. Only a wolf, not a dog, could help us find joy, which hints that comfort now has to come from something wild and hard rather than tame. The mood is anxious, chilly and ghostly, with a small, stubborn wish for warmth underneath.