Here, the speaker asks what it means to be a conscious being, and the answer is both humbling and tender. We are "incomplete objects," bodies and brains that produce something extra: thought, awareness, a sense of "I." The speaker describes this as an "effervescence," like fizz rising from the machinery of the brain. Yet the same thoughts that make us aware also haunt and mislead us, and the Self keeps slipping out of view.
The tone is quiet, reflective and a little wistful. The speaker doesn't sound angry about this limit, just honest. The Self can't be seized by force or coaxed by gentle asking. Then the poem softens in its last lines: we might glimpse who we are "sometimes, / in other eyes." The scattered spacing on the page mirrors that sense of fragility, and it leaves the reader with a small, hopeful idea: we come to know ourselves through other people.