The poem plays with one verb, "ate," and stretches it until it covers almost everything a person goes through in a day. The speaker eats hours, a fancy restaurant meal, and then, at home, "sad news." The list slides from the ordinary to the strange and unsettling: "a body," "a heart." Eating stops being only about food and becomes a way of taking in experience, grief, and even other people.
Death is there from the start, sharing the table as a companion, and the speaker seems oddly content, "with full satisfaction." That calm sits uneasily beside the darker items on the menu. The ending turns inward. The speaker is left as "a thin piece of me likely / to contract," which suggests shrinking, but also hints at catching something, as in contracting an illness. The mood is dry, a little wry, and quietly mournful. The speaker has consumed so much that little of themselves remains, and the title's "comestibles" makes it all sound like a harmless shopping list.