The poem begins before we can think or speak, in the blurry moment before colours become images and noise becomes words. At that point, the speaker says, one desire already exists: to touch and be touched. Everything after grows from that craving. The speaker calls it a dream, the hope that we might reach past the surface of things and hold their "ineffable essence," something too deep for words.
The speaker treats the rest of life as a response to that dream. Sadness is mourning for it, sex is a frantic way of affirming it, and speech is a quiet admission that it can't come true. The tone is searching and a little wistful, but not hopeless. The turn comes with "your smile," which makes the speaker doubt that the dream is impossible. The closing lines, trailing off into an ellipsis, suggest that closeness may simply take forms other than the one the dream imagined. The mood ends tender and tentatively hopeful.