An oasis is supposed to mean rescue: water in the middle of dryness. In "fake visions," signed simply "sage," it becomes the place where rescue fails. Two people walk beside the water, one asks a question, the other answers at length, and nothing is resolved, because the speaker's attention is already elsewhere, on a reflection. The central idea is a loneliness that survives company. You can pour everything out to another person and still be alone with the picture of yourself you carry around.
The poem opens with a stanza of one flat line, "we walked along the oasis," which sounds like the start of an ordinary story. It is also the last time the two figures share a pronoun. After it, they become "he" and "me," and the gap between them widens.
The second stanza turns to liquid. "He asked me what my problem was" is blunt, and it could be concern or impatience. The answer comes in a strange simile: "then like silk, i spilled." Silk is cloth, but here it behaves like water, smooth and unresisting. The comparison suggests a confession that comes out easily because it has been told before, and the stretched-out "a g a i n" confirms it. The spaced letters force the reader to slow down and take the word one letter at a time, like drips or like a tired sigh. The white space before it works like a pause to gather breath. Then comes "i poured and poured till / all but my feet were dried." The break after "till" lets the sentence itself spill over the line. The final image is odd. The speaker is emptied like a desert, except for the feet. Perhaps they are still wet because the speaker stands at the water's edge, or because the spill has pooled there. The poem doesn't say, and the strangeness is part of its effect, since it makes the drained speaker feel physically unfamiliar.
Against all this pouring, the listener's response is "television buzz." The plural "attempts" suggests he keeps trying, but his words reach the speaker only as background noise, sound without content. The word "television" also contains "vision," and it echoes the title. His comfort is a kind of fake vision too, a flat picture on a screen with nobody behind it. The setting adds to the idea, since an oasis is also the classic mirage.
The last stanza explains why the comfort failed. "For I was too busy" uses "for" as a slightly formal, old-fashioned conjunction, as though the speaker were calmly stating a verdict. This is also the poem's only capital "I," after two lowercase ones in "i spilled" and "i poured." Whether or not it was deliberate, it reads well. The self that dissolved into the confession stands up straight again when it turns to its own image.
The word "moping" is small, a little childish, and faintly comic. It stops the poem from wallowing, because the speaker can see how self-absorbed the moment is. The preposition matters too. One mopes "for" someone else, and the speaker treats the reflection as a separate being, a "sad creature" to be pitied. "Creature" is a distancing word, half animal, half stranger. The reflection is "staring back," as intent on the speaker as the speaker is on it, and it lives on "the other side of the water." That phrase puts a barrier between the two, though the water might also be read as the speaker's own spilled feeling. The poem ends there with no full stop, so the gaze is never broken.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm is close to speech, with the soft hiss of "silk," "spilled," "sad creature staring" set against the abrupt "buzz." The guillemets around the title make it look quoted, as though the phrase were being held at a distance, much like the reflection.
The poem is significant for its compression. In a handful of lines it uses three images, silk, television and water, to describe three states: confession, noise and self-recognition. It also catches an uncomfortable truth about being comforted. Sometimes the person beside us is not the one we are actually talking to. The speaker empties out for him, but the real relationship, and the real sympathy, belongs to the figure in the water.