Pickering's cities don't arrive the way cities usually do, by being built. They "pour" out of dreams "like a swarm of lanterns", a simile that makes them light, mobile and faintly alive, more insect than architecture. The first line sets the terms for everything after it: the cities come *out of* the speaker, so the poem is a tour of somewhere that exists only because it has been dreamed and then written down.
The first stanza is the stranger of the two. Its cities are like "snakes which swallow their tails, / entering by their own posterns". A postern is a small back gate, so these cities slip in through their own side doors, a closed loop with no outside to speak of. Their only conversation is "mute communication", and the poem confirms the self-enclosure with a flat statement: "Neither with inside nor outside." Then comes the surprise. The institutions of civilization have been quietly taken over. The rainforest "shades their squares", gibbons are sheltered in the "chancelleries", and nightingales "nest" in the palaces. Offices and thrones, the machinery of "seriousness", now house animals. The stanza ends on its barest line: "Nowhere is there to hide and listen." In a place with no inside, there is no hiding place from which to eavesdrop, so the dreamer can only take part.
The sound of the stanza matches its theme of things circling back. The poem has no fixed scheme, but rhymes return at a distance: "cities" with "pities", "lanterns" with "posterns", "civilization" with "communication". They echo across the first seven lines like a pattern half remembered on waking. "Tails" and "nightingales" are only a near-rhyme. Lines run from about seven to ten syllables and sound like speech, so the rhymes land as small surprises rather than drumbeats.
The second stanza turns from looking to doing, and the "I" becomes active. The speaker binds "girls' hairs" with "feast-coloured speech ribbons / as you read here". That phrase is the poem's most daring move. The ribbons are the words on the page, and the reader is suddenly addressed as "you". The dream city is something the poem hands over, not something it only describes. The speaker also courts "sad saints" with "shards of youth and aged hands", figures who seem both young and old, and who "catch declined and fallen species". The poem doesn't say what has fallen, but set beside the rainforest and the gibbons, the dream city starts to look like a refuge for what the waking world loses. "Declined" may also carry a faint grammatical echo, since words are declined too, which would fit a stanza so occupied with speech.
The final sentence holds the poem's boldest image. A "finger of bread dipped in factual / memories or in dreams" becomes a paintbrush, and the speaker's "palate paints" a "swathe of delicious / meadows" across London. Taste does the work of sight here. London is the only real place the poem names, and the dream is laid over it like a wash of colour. Note too that "factual" is stranded at a line-end, then answered by "actual" in the last line. The two words are rhymed, so fact and dream sit in the same pattern, and the speaker declines to rank "factual memories" above "dreams". The meadows lie in "lands / that belong, yet, to no-one actual". "Yet" can mean "still" or "not so far", so the ownerless lands might one day acquire an owner, or might always stay free. Either way, the palaces of stanza one are occupied by nightingales, and these lands have no human proprietor at all.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it treats imagination as a way of giving things back, not a way of escaping. Its dream cities have been returned to forests and birdsong, its meadows overlay a real capital, and its ribbons of speech are offered openly to whoever is reading. The poem suggests a shared, unowned space that only language can open, and it leaves the door, or the postern, unlocked.