Nobody in "Talk" says anything we could quote back. There are no speech marks, no names, and no explanation of who "you" is or what "this" means in the opening line, "I love it when it's like this." Yet the poem is about conversation, specifically the half-finished way two people speak when they understand each other well enough to skip the details. The speaker says as much: "I know this is what we need. / Our own language." The poem is written in that language, and we are eavesdropping.
The first images are fragments with no subject: "Riding the flowers. // Hoovering the leaves." The verbs are slightly wrong, and that is where the interest lies. You ride a bike or a horse, not a flower, and you hoover a carpet, not a tree's leaves. Nature is treated like housework, so the garden feels both magical and domestic. Then "Hoovering" turns into "Hovering" near the end, one letter lost, in "Hovering bees." Even the rhythm repeats: both phrases fall as a stressed syllable, two light ones, and a final stress. The poem moves the way loose talk does, with one word triggering the next. Sound leads and sense follows.
The middle quatrain is the most orderly part: "Grow, grow big as trees. / First, we must sew the seed. / Don't pull at the weeds. / Grass disagrees." The voice becomes instructive, like a nursery rhyme or advice given to a child, a plant, or a partner. The long *ee* sound chimes through "trees," "seed," "weeds" and "disagrees," and the doubled "Grow, grow" makes growth feel like something chanted. The spelling "sew" where we expect "sow" may be a deliberate pun or a slip. Either way it pulls stitching into the garden, as though seeds were words to be threaded together. "Grass disagrees" is the poem's only open disagreement, and it comes from grass. Given that the speaker earlier says "I knew you were sceptical," it is tempting to hear a quiet human argument carried over into the lawn, though the poem never confirms this.
Then the mood turns without any change in sound. The *ee* that sounded soothing in "trees" is still there in "bees" and "flee," but now it belongs to alarm: "Hovering bees. / Humans scream and flee." The poem suggests that comfort and panic can be made of the same material, and that a pleasant sound is only pleasant until something changes around it. The next line is "Planes engines screams," and the grammar buckles. Nouns pile up, and a plural sits awkwardly beside a singular verb. Whether this is intended or not, it works, because the sentence seems to panic along with its subject. The word "screams" also echoes the humans who "scream," so people and machines become hard to tell apart. All we have left is noise.
The ending is stripped of everything that came before. "Go back inside." "Spin again." The shared "we" is gone and bare commands remain, with no clear speaker. Indoors is the obvious refuge, but the final instruction is stranger. Spinning might suggest a record, a washing machine, a propeller, or the act of spinning a story, which would make it a comment on talk itself. It also sends us back to the opening line, as if the poem could start over and the speaker could love "it" again.
What makes "Talk" worth reading is how much it trusts the reader. It never says what the bees, the planes or the "you" stand for, and we have to decide. Its short lines, one-line stanzas and sudden collisions of sound show that intimacy depends on a small, private world, and that the loud outside world can break it up in a few lines. A private language works only while no one else is shouting over it.