Mike Stone's "Displacements" drops us into a midnight forest where a speaker is close to someone he loves, her lips at his ear. The scene feels dreamlike. A harpsichord seems to drift between the beechnut trees, cotton spores float on the wind, and mushrooms glow in the dark. Time loosens, and the speaker calls the setting a "place out of time," where moments flow like liquid wherever their cheeks touch.
The mood is hushed and sensuous at first, then slightly uneasy. As the speaker gazes at her, she shifts from woman to god to monster and back again, while her smile grows more ironic. That suggests love can make a person seem larger, stranger, even frightening, and that the speaker can never quite pin her down. The closing lines step back to a bigger idea: people are "fragments of a great symbol" and also symbols of a great fragment. The poem seems to say that intimacy is both overwhelming and puzzling, a brief glimpse of something whole.