Fragments of a city come at us one after another, and the poem never explains how they connect. It opens with a cold phrase about "collecting people bought / or sold formerly," which hints at a history of buying and selling human beings. Then the city appears: old, hot, and unsafe to enter. The speaker seems to be looking at a place where suffering has piled up over time.
The mood turns more personal in the middle. The question "who buries his child / without a void" suggests that no one can lose a child without feeling an emptiness. Then the strange line about night being born in a microscope makes the view feel narrow and clinical, as if the speaker is studying darkness up close.
The ending is the most moving part. The speaker invites us to "come see the dead," who are now divided after being "so long together." The tone is somber, uneasy, and quietly mournful, with grief and distance running side by side.