Nine short lines, no punctuation and almost no capital letters, and still the poem manages a complete change of landscape. A speaker addresses a lover and describes what that person has done to him. Inside him there was a "drought of innocence", a dryness and lack of experience. The lover has turned it into something lush and warm. The central idea is that love, or desire, transforms. It doesn't simply add pleasure to a life. It changes the climate of the one who receives it.
The poem opens by naming its subject: "fall-coloured love". The word "fall" is worth pausing on. In its plainest sense it means autumn, the season of ambers, rusts and browns, so the love is already warm-toned and a little late in the year. But "fall" also means a descent, and it sits next to "innocence" a few lines later. The poem never mentions Eden, but the judging-by-the-words inference is hard to resist: this is a love that comes with a fall from innocence, and the speaker seems to welcome it.
The first stanza's boldest move is its grammar. "You are making a Mexico" turns a country into something you can manufacture, and the capital M is the only capital letter in the poem, so the word glows on the page. We are not told what "Mexico" means, only what it does. It brings heat, colour and a sense of the foreign and unfamiliar. The raw material is "the succulent darkness". "Succulent" does double work. It means juicy and sensual, but it is also the word for desert plants that store water to survive dry spells. That fits both the drought and the Mexican setting. The darkness holds moisture, and the speaker's dryness is what the lover works on. The preposition "from" implies the drought is not erased but used as raw material, as if emptiness were a kind of clay.
In the second stanza the poem shifts from statement to picture. "Balls of lamplight / drop dragons of carnival / snakily in the black water." Lamps reflect in dark water, and the wobbling, stretched reflections become the long bodies of carnival dragons. The verbs and sounds carry this movement. "Drop" and "dragons" echo the "dr" of "drought", as if the dryness has been answered by liquid. "Snakily" is an unusual adverb that makes the reflections writhe, and its soft s sounds slide on into "black water". The snake may also quietly recall the fall suggested earlier, though the poem doesn't insist on it. Notice, too, that water has now arrived. The drought is over, and the poem lets the darkness literally glitter.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short, and as printed here they drift across the page in staggered indentation, which suits the image of reflections shifting on a surface. Instead of rhyme, the poem relies on repeated sounds: the plush "s" of "succulent" and "innocence", the "d" of "drought", "drop" and "dragons". Because nothing is punctuated, the sentences flow into each other and we have to decide where they break.
That matters most in the final lines: "and you sleep turns / in my hands". Read one way, "you sleep" is a clumsy phrase, but it may be a deliberate compression of "you sleep, and your sleep turns", or "you sleep, turning". Either way, the lover is now still and trusting, and the speaker is holding something fragile. The line break after "turns" makes the verse itself turn, so the ending acts out what it describes. It is a quiet end after the carnival, and the gentleness arrives only after the exotic imagery.
The poem is significant for how much change it fits into so small a space. It moves from abstraction to image, from heat to water, from the speaker's emptiness to a lover asleep in his hands, without a single explanatory sentence. Its strangeness is deliberate. We are asked to feel the experience before we can fully paraphrase it, which is a good lesson in how poetry works.