A traveller steps up to a currency counter and, against the odds, nobody is waiting. The clerk is a "nice unqueued for girl", pleased with his face and with the "rippling summer" outside, and she cheerfully cashes an "unused travel check". That is the whole scene. Yet by the last line the poem has moved from a small transaction to a large and unsettling suggestion: that every exchange is a kind of loss, and that the border between gaining and losing, or between "living" and "dying", is thinner than we like to think.
The title does a lot of the work. "Currency" means money, but it also means a current, something flowing, and the poem keeps both senses afloat. The summer "ripples", and the girl "abstracts" the price from the cheque. That verb is a neat double meaning, since to abstract is to withdraw something and also to turn something concrete into an idea. Money is being drawn out of a piece of paper and made into pure number. The odd detail that the rate is worked out in books makes the point stronger. The cheque is converted into the price of *More Utopia* and *How to Be Quickly Rich*, two titles that pull in opposite directions. One is the dream of a perfect place, with a pun in "More" that sounds like plain wanting. The other is the dream of fast profit. The name "Stockmann's" suggests a department store and a foreign city, so the speaker's position seems that of an outsider whose money has to be translated before it means anything. That is a fair image of any traveller, or of anyone trying to turn wishes into something spendable.
The poem's form is as awkward as its speaker. It is free verse with no regular metre, and almost all of it is a single sentence that spills over its line-endings: "the price of / More Utopia", "let me / release my right foot". Because the grammar loops so much, it is hard to tell whether "let me release" is addressed to the girl or just a sigh of relief. The body shows through the syntax. The speaker's right foot is "strapedoed behind my left ankle", a made-up word that seems to blend *strapped* and *torpedoed*. It is easy to picture someone standing with one foot hooked behind the other, shy, flattered, and a little trapped. The word itself looks twisted, and the poem seems to know it. "Tightness of words", the speaker admits, "may well / burst the seam's seamlessness." Here the poem comments on its own compression. It is stitched so tightly that the stitching may show, and the phrase "seam's seamlessness" lets the *s* sounds hiss like thread being pulled through.
Then the manner changes. After that long, tangled sentence come two short ones, both end-stopped, both blunt: "Confuse the buying / with the selling price. / Or living, with dying." The first is an instruction, though it is hard to say how seriously it is meant. At a bureau de change the gap between buying and selling rates is the profit the house keeps, so confusing them means losing track of what each trade costs you. The poem then slips that same logic into life. Notice how "buying" and "dying" rhyme across the final lines, the only true rhyme in the poem, as though the sound itself has done the confusing. The stray comma in "living, with dying" works like a stumble, a pause where the two words ought to run into each other.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it holds charm and chill together. The scene is light: summer, a friendly girl, a flirtatious moment. Yet the imagery of unused cheques, quick riches, and an ideal place always out of reach leaves a faint sense of time being spent as well as money. Judging by the imagery, the speaker lives in the gap between what things cost and what they fetch, and has noticed that this gap exists in life too. The poem never preaches this. It lets a vocabulary of tills and tickets quietly carry the idea that nothing is exchanged for free.