Willowsails's speaker admits to a daily habit of borrowing identities. It isn't quite theft of a person, but a shaping of how others see them and what others think of them. The poem's central puzzle comes quickly: why fear losing yourself when you don't know who you are or where you belong? The speaker calls this strange, and the poem never tries to solve it.
The feeling is uneasy and searching. The quoted line, "I know you more than you know yourself," suggests how other people claim to understand us, yet the speaker feels like a stranger to everyone, even to the version of themselves that will one day lie in a casket. The thoughtful self who ponders at night stays hidden from others too. By the end, even the person writing the poems is unknown to the reader and, it seems, to the writer. The mood is quiet, introspective and a little lonely, like a late-night thought left open.