Reading this poem feels like drifting through a dream where love and unease are tangled together. It opens under a falling moon, surrounded by thieves and entropy, so from the start we sense things slipping away or being stolen. The bleached, "white-washed" scenes of sleepers suggest a cold, almost clinical intimacy. Bodies come apart and merge, until "man assumes woman / woman / man," as though desire blurs identity itself.
The speaker seems both fascinated and wary. Phrases like "every wrong act" and the image of a vessel narrowing into a stem and "rosy spur" hint at guilt, and at beauty growing out of something painful. "Comic our tragic lips / poison and sing" captures the mix of absurdity and hurt the title's "vagaries" points to.
The ending turns darker still: scorpions, falling wheat, and a thin span of moonlight on a half-lit door. The mood is eerie, hypnotic and uncertain, with love left hovering between threat and possibility.