The poem opens with a small mistake that becomes a gateway. On a rainy evening the speaker's door stands open, and the elephants, taking it for "a green stretch / of forest," simply "trundle through." The verb suits them. It is heavy and a little comic, and it makes the giants sound like unhurried guests rather than wild animals. From this first sentence the logic is that of a dream, where a doorway can be a forest and a room can fill with herds. The poem soon says as much: "The mind is a traitor / giving away our tales / when we are half awake." Half-waking is where the poem lives, at the moment the guard drops and whatever we have buried walks in.
What the elephants bring with them is sorrow. Each one "concocts a song or howl of her own," and the speaker reaches for the orchestra to describe them: "a moan of bassoon, a pitch of piccolos / and even agonies of strings." The range is well chosen, since a low bassoon and a shrill piccolo fit an animal that both rumbles and trumpets. The word that matters most, though, is "agonies." The plural turns a musical phrase into a list of pains. "Tragedies coated in silt" adds the sense of time, with grief laid down in layers like river mud over something lost. The poem never repeats the old saying that elephants don't forget, but the sediment image carries the same idea.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The poem is eight tercets of uneven lines, held together by enjambment. Sentences spill over the stanza breaks ("tell of elephant // tragedies"), so the thoughts never stay in their containers, much as dreams and grief don't. Sound does some of the work that rhyme might. The long o's of "moan of bassoon" sound like a low note, and the stressed syllables of "plain, enormous, / hidden" land with a footfall's weight.
The middle of the poem sets up a divide between those who can hear and those who can't. "Only their ears detect the mourning notes / delivered by miles of unsuspecting / stone." The phrase "unsuspecting stone" is quietly eerie, as though the earth were a postman carrying a message it knows nothing about. The others are shut out. Honeyguide, a bird whose name promises guidance, is "bereft" and "never gleans / more than sugar." The syntax here is knotty, and it is hard to tell exactly what the bird's "skinny bird feet" are meant to feel. The judgement is clear enough, though. Sweetness is all that reaches her, and the monkeys "still pick and chatter." The bright, busy surface of life misses the deeper note.
Then comes a paradox. The elephants move to safety with "colors same as vapor, same as wood, / same as sky." The repeated "same as" dissolves them into the landscape, yet they "stand plain, enormous, / hidden." Judging by the imagery, this is the poem's central idea. Grief on that scale can stand in full view and still go unseen by anyone who isn't listening.
The last stanzas turn from description to invitation. "Drift closer to hear nightsong, closer / to dream... closer to meet elephants." The repeated "closer" works like a lullaby, drawing the reader toward sleep and toward attention at once. Into this comes the surprising "prancing dog—wise / as Buddha," an image that is funny and slightly absurd. It suggests that dreams, unlike many public griefs, allow comedy next to sorrow without apology. The final phrase, "a dripping melodic forest," brings back the rain of the first line, and now the rain is music. The forest the elephants mistook the door for has become real, and the mistake has turned into a place where we can meet them.
The poem is worth reading because it doesn't explain its sorrow. It never says whose tragedies these are or what the elephants lost. It trusts the reader to treat listening as a way of knowing, so that the grief belongs to whoever is willing to drift closer.