Two people sleep in two rooms, and the whole poem happens in the gap between them. "You sleep / in another room" is flat, almost domestic, yet the line break after "sleep" leaves the sleeper briefly alone on the page before the room is named. The poem never explains what has put them apart. It shows only that the separation does not keep the night out. The "sea's rowdies", waves pictured as a rough, unruly crowd, "savage our dreams", and the small word "our" matters here. The beds are separate, but the dreams are still shared.
Then the imagery turns surreal. A "waterfall / rollerskates under the house." The picture is funny and a little absurd, and it works on two levels. Water really does glide and rumble like wheels on a hard floor. The image also puts something restless underneath the house, below the safe surface of the home, which is where we might expect the unconscious to be. The word "another" appears twice, first in "another room" and then in "another waterfall", so the poem keeps offering alternatives. The sea is hostile, but this water is playful, almost childlike, and the speaker answers it directly: "I love you, water: / dream of flying with you." The quotation marks suggest a spoken line, perhaps said inside the dream itself. It is also unclear whether "dream of flying" is a command or a confession with the "I" left out. That uncertainty suits a poem set in sleep. The "you" has also shifted from a person to water, and judging by the imagery, the speaker may be turning from one companion to the other.
The second stanza is darker and more compressed. "The night hawk seizes me / every night by the neck / but his swoop fails." The sentence contradicts itself, since the hawk has hold of the speaker and yet fails. "Every night" turns the attack into routine, a nightmare worn down into a habit. The poem does not say what the hawk stands for, whether fear, insomnia, a rival or something else, but its imagery is the opposite of water's. It is a predator that grips and strikes from above, where water gives way.
The last three lines hold the poem's quiet turn. "I'll always fall / into a trickle of water. / I won't ever fly with him." The water has shrunk from sea to waterfall to trickle, as if the poem were draining away. Falling usually means defeat, but here the speaker lands in the thing they said they loved. The sound reinforces this, because "fall" echoes both "waterfall" and the "fails" of the hawk's swoop, so failure and falling blur together. The word "won't" is also slippery. It can mean the speaker is unable to fly with the hawk, or that they refuse to. The poem lets both readings stand, and that makes the failure feel like a kind of choice.
The form is free verse with no rhyme, in short lines that often stop hard on a stressed word: "sleep", "room", "dreams", "house". The vocabulary is plain, which makes the odd images stand out more. The sounds are chosen with care. The hissing of "sea's rowdies savage" gives way to the rolling r's and l's of "rollerskates", then returns in "seizes" and "swoop", so that you hear the change from playful water to predatory bird. The first stanza has eight lines and the second six, and the shorter second stanza closes in on the final trickle.
The poem is significant because it fits loneliness, tenderness and fear into fourteen lines without turning melodramatic. It does not mention a quarrel or a loss, only rooms, water and a bird, and from these it builds a feeling many readers will recognise: lying awake or half-asleep, close to someone and yet apart. Its humour (a waterfall on rollerskates) and its menace (a hand on the neck) sit side by side. In the end it suggests that falling gently into what you love may be a better outcome than flying with what frightens you.