The speaker looks so closely at a lover's face that it stops looking like a face and turns into a map. The title, "Trip," hints at a journey, and it may also hint at a hallucinatory state, though the poem never says so outright. Features become geography: faint blue rivers, blank hills, and quarry-holes that stand in for the ears and nose, places where sound and scent are "extracted." The language of mining and industry makes the face feel both vast and strangely cold.
The mood shifts as the map nears its edge. The "settling ponds / of an unsettling color" bring in a note of unease, and the red beltway at the bottom leads to teeth, a "skyline of incisors." Beyond them lies the "dark & pulsating / inner city" of the mouth. What begins as curious wandering ends somewhere intimate and slightly alarming. The speaker seems fascinated and a little disoriented, caught between tenderness and the eerie feeling of seeing a familiar person as unfamiliar land.