Snow is the first thing we are given, and it isn't snow at all. "The moon shines through the window like snow" is a simile that sets the poem's terms: light will behave like something soft, cold and settling. By the end, the comparison has quietly turned literal. The moon walks into a garden and covers the stems and leaves with white, and the dream has done what the simile promised.
Before that happens, the poem sets up two ways of spending a winter night. The husband sleeps on the porch "in the cold / to hear coyotes and owls and wind." He goes out to meet the night, and his reward is sound, a list of wild noises piled up with the repeated "and." The speaker stays in "the warm room / with a cat curled small against me." Her night is nearly silent: "no sounds but her breath." The phrase "curled small" is itself curled, with its soft c and l sounds, and the short line "I sleep in the warm room" sits like a pause between the husband's cold and the cat's warmth. Nothing here is a quarrel. The poem treats two kinds of attention as equally valid, one that listens outward and one that settles inward.
The word "her" is easy to pass over. The cat's breath is "her" breath, and a few lines later the moon is "She." The two female presences never meet, but the pronoun links them. The cat is the small, warm, living version of the same quiet that the moon brings from outside, which is why the first stanza can end so peacefully with "the moonlight falling on the roof." Moonlight doesn't fall, but snow does, and the verb is the simile at work again.
The second stanza shifts into the future: "I will dream of a garden." The speaker does not say she is dreaming but that she will, as if the dream were something she knows is waiting, like a familiar room. The garden is full of tangled sensations. It is dark, yet there are fallen leaves, so the season is autumn sliding into winter. There is "the scent of snow," which is a strange phrase, since snow has hardly any smell, and the strangeness suits a dream, where the senses cross over. Her companion is "my dead father." The poem gives that fact no emphasis. The father is simply there, working beside her, and the plain statement carries the feeling: the dead are present and ordinary in this garden, and there is no fear in it.
The sound "like a thousand bees" is the most surprising image. Bees belong to summer, so this is a warm, humming sound in a cold, dark place. It is also the only noise the speaker hears in the whole poem apart from the husband's wild ones, and it is a gentle, crowded hum. Then the father does something courteous and almost ceremonial: he "opens the gate / to the moon." He acts as host, and the moon is the guest. She enters "whispering," a word whose hissing sounds carry through "stems and leaves with white." The husband went outside for coyotes, owls and wind. The speaker gets a whisper, which is quieter but more intimate, because it comes to her.
The form is free verse, with no rhyme, and the plain, conversational lines fit the subject. The two stanzas are each seven lines long, so the poem is balanced like the two halves of a night, waking and dreaming. Its structure also follows the light. It begins on the roof, falls through the window, and ends in the garden, moving from outside to inside and from the real to the imagined.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It deals with grief, marriage and the dead, but it doesn't announce any of them. Instead it lets one image, the moon as snow, carry the meaning. The moon covers the garden the way snow covers a grave or a field, gently and completely, and the poem suggests that consolation can arrive this way, through a gate held open by someone we have lost.