On a rainy evening, the speaker's open door becomes, in the elephants' eyes, an entrance to green forest, and they wander through. What follows feels like a half-waking dream. Each elephant makes her own music, and the poem describes it through instruments: bassoon, piccolos, strings. Their songs seem to carry grief, "tragedies coated in silt." The speaker suggests the mind gives away its stories when we're drowsy, and that is how we end up falling in love with these animals and following them into the sound.
The scene widens into a landscape of birds, monkeys and stone, where the elephants blend into vapor, wood and sky. They are huge yet hidden. The speaker seems to be inviting us, and maybe themselves, to "drift closer" and listen. The mood is gentle, hushed and dreamy, tinged with sadness but mostly wonder. The poem ends in a "dripping melodic forest," where the boundary between room, dream and wilderness has dissolved.