The speaker is at a computer, listening to a recording of Sylvia Plath's voice, and the experience stops everything else. The opening claim, "My computer is haunted," is half joke and half truth: the machine has become a place where the dead can speak. The line about the city melting like sugar makes the world feel soft and unreal while the voice stays sharp and close.
What moves the speaker most is the strange intimacy. Plath is known to them through reading, yet the recording makes her feel "so here," alive in a continuous present rather than fixed on the page. That leaves a question with no easy answer: how can you long for someone you never met? The speaker shivers and cannot simply shrug it off.
The mood is quiet, awed and a little unsettled. The closing image, "the ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird," suggests that recorded sound keeps even small, fleeting things almost alive, which is both comforting and eerie.