The speaker begins with a compliment that sounds almost like a burden: people say they have a gift for sitting with the dead. What follows isn't an explanation but a run of odd, dreamlike images. The speaker claims to know "the disease of the stone," as if even something lifeless could be sick, and then offers the unsettling "hot pie made of a swan," where something graceful and beautiful has been turned into food.
The last image is the most striking: a rose cried at the sight of the speaker's hands. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's closeness to death may carry a cost. Even a flower seems to recoil, or to grieve, at what those hands have touched. The mood is eerie, quiet, and a little sorrowful. The speaker doesn't complain, but the poem leaves us wondering whether this "gift" is really a kind of loneliness, a knowledge that sets them apart from living, blooming things.