Looking through old photographs is usually a gentle thing to do, but the speaker here treats it as the start of something closer to an eruption. The opening line, set in guillemets like a caption under a picture, is plain and almost casual: «I looked through some old photos». What follows is anything but. The memories "surfaced like / smoke from a furnace," and the poem's central idea begins to show itself. Memory is not something we simply recall. It rises in us, and it can overwhelm the language we use to describe it.
The furnace image is worth slowing down for. A furnace contains fire, and smoke is what escapes when the containment fails. So the memories seem to be the residue of something that once burned, and the speaker does not say what. The smoke's route is also physical: "up from the chest & through the throat / to find a home behind the eyes." The body becomes a kind of chimney, and the journey ends where tears form and where mental pictures are seen. The word "home" is oddly tender in this setting. These memories are unwelcome, yet they settle behind the eyes as if they belonged there. The stanza closes on a double full stop ("eyes..") that is neither a clean period nor a full ellipsis, a small typographical way of letting the thought trail off.
The second movement widens from "I" to "we," and the poem's elements shift from fire to water. "Our hands have searched & found / the feelings we wish to drown." The hands that turned over photographs now seem to be searching for something less comfortable. The wish to drown a feeling is a wish to submerge it, though the poem has already shown that smoke rises and does not stay down. Then comes the nighttime image: dreams "creep & crawl along the night / into the darkest corners where / creatures hide." The verbs are low and insect-like. The line break after "where" leaves the reader hanging over the dark, and the short line "creatures hide" lands with a thud. It is left unclear whether the creatures are the dreams themselves or something the dreams disturb, and that ambiguity makes the passage unsettling.
The structure rewards attention. The whole second half is one long sentence built from three "when" clauses, and the question it leads to is withheld until the very end. The word "when" even stands alone on its own line, like a held breath. The poem has no regular rhythm and no end-rhymes, so its music has to come from elsewhere. The sound of "found," "drown," "sounds" and "unbound" echoes through the stanzas, a chain of near-rhymes. This is most striking where the poem describes language coming apart: "the words become sounds unbound / from meaning." The form behaves like its subject. As meaning loosens, the poem's sounds are what hold it together, and the lines grow looser and more fragmentary. The ampersands do something similar. They replace "and" with a quick, handwritten-looking symbol, as though the speaker is writing fast and cannot stop for full words.
The ending is circular. The poem began with images, the photographs, and it finishes with "only vague feelings / & images" remaining once words have gone. We have travelled from looking at pictures to a state where pictures are nearly all that is left. The final line, "What happens then?", is the only sentence in the poem that is a direct question, and the poem declines to answer it. The speaker could be asking what happens to a person when feeling outruns speech. Silence, grief, and the first impulse to make art are all possible answers, and the poem leaves the choice to the reader.
What makes the poem significant is that it manages to be about the limits of words while still being made of them. The name under which it appears, "wordsforghosts," seems to fit that tension, though that is only an inference from the name itself. Words offered to things that cannot answer back is a fair description of what the poem does. For a student reader, its lesson is that a poem does not have to explain a feeling in order to convey it. Here the smoke, the drowning, the creeping dreams and the unanswered question carry the feeling, and the reader is left to sit in the dark with it.