A pair of mating snakes drops out of a ceiling, and the first thing the speaker tells us is what did not happen: "I do not dream of snakes." It is a wry, sidelong opening. The most startling event is mentioned in a subordinate clause, and the sentence turns at once to the dream, as if the mind prefers to talk about anything but the obvious. What the speaker dreams of is "mating," then breaking through "the crust of the earth" into a world "filled with an unnatural light," then "inescapable stairs" and a cliff-face where he clings "like a wingless fly." So the night is already full of desire, trapped climbing, and a longing to get out of the ordinary world, before we learn that the real house has been busy with its own version.
The poem is a prose paragraph followed by a short three-line verse, a pairing that resembles a haibun, though the poem gives no label. The prose has no rhyme and no fixed metre. Its rhythm is that of a thoughtful person talking, with long sentences that gather clauses and then relax. There are small moments of music, though. The wood thrush sings "one part joy, two parts longing," a phrase that sounds like a recipe and a diagnosis at once. The repeated "always," in "where wood thrushes always sing" and "as milk snakes always seem to be," gives the morning a settled, reassuring pattern, which makes the one disruption stand out more.
The notebook is the funniest and saddest object in the poem. The speaker abandoned his writing at the sound of a noise, "(some writer!)," and the parenthesis is a self-deprecating shrug. What he left behind is a pair of fragments, "Picking at a scab" and "worry beads," and he admits, "I'm sure I had something in mind, but I don't know what." Both images are about restless fiddling, and they fit a mind that can't leave anything alone. They also show that writing has failed to explain anything. The camera, and then plain watching, caught what the notebook couldn't.
The snakes themselves get the poem's most tender language. Their coiled "configuration" makes them look like "one snake with a head at both ends," a double creature so entwined that it undoes the idea of two separate bodies. They are "curious but calm," and the speaker responds with a strange generosity: he would have "offered the use of my body as a steep set of stairs." Here the dream returns. In the dream, stairs were something to be stuck on and afraid of, and now stairs are what the speaker would willingly become. The fear of the cliff turns into hospitality, and he offers a way up instead of clinging helplessly. Whether the snakes could use him hardly matters. The wish itself shows how the poem's anxiety has changed.
The ending of the prose is plain and slightly comic. The snakes return to the ceiling because of "unfinished business," a phrase that makes them sound like busy neighbours, and then comes the childlike "up they went." The mystery is not explained. It is simply allowed to leave.
The closing verse, "night kitchen / feeling in the dark to pour / a glass of milk," quietly pulls the poem together. Milk echoes the snakes' name and their calm, and the kitchen is where the noise began. The lines are not a strict 5-7-5; they run roughly three, seven and four syllables, which suits the groping they describe. Pouring milk in the dark is a small act of trust in the hands, the same bodily knowing that the notebook could not capture. It is also ambiguous. We can't tell whether this is the same night, a later one, or a habit the snakes have now made strange.
The poem is significant because it takes a very odd event and refuses to inflate it. It doesn't claim the snakes mean something; it lets dream, notebook and ceiling all fail to explain one another, and finds a kind of grace in that. Reality turns out to be stranger than the dream, and the right response is attention, humour and a glass of milk poured by feel.