Falling asleep is pictured here as drifting out to sea, with each swell pulling the sleepers toward something deeper. The speaker and a partner share this passage, and in the morning the partner recounts their dreams: odd, often lovely ones, like escaping a derailed train and landing in a meadow of wildflowers. The speaker stays quiet. Their own dreams are violent and unsettling, full of eating glass, a hungry crowd, and a desert creeping forward like mist.
The turn comes with the last dream, in which poetry still matters, lilacs are offered, and a restless crowd is calmed with "elegant words." It's the gentlest image in the poem, and perhaps the most painful, because waking cuts it off. The flat, hurried list at the end (cigarettes, shower, "shit," dress, work) feels deflated. The mood moves from hushed and dreamlike to bleak and weary, suggesting the speaker's hope for poetry's worth survives only while asleep.