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The dish water symbolizes the woman’s adopted world and its inability to allow her even a modest sense of self-esteem. The speaker notes that the woman cannot see her beauty in the dingy dish water over which she toils. The dirty water and the poor lighting in the restaurant’s kitchen, unlike the crystalline waters of the rivers back home that the speaker imagines, reflect nothing but drab darkness. 

The woman that so entrances the speaker is employed as a dish washer in some unnamed restaurant in New York City. That employment is the version of the American Dream that she departed her tropical world to discover. However, the poem implies that hers is a life of soul-crushing routine, backbreaking work, and minimum pay. Her work denies her the dignity of self-worth and destroys her self-esteem. 

The woman then can see nothing of herself in the dish water, not merely her reflection but her authentic self, her soul, and her beauty. The scullery work that she is doing denies her any self-esteem save that the speaker, happening to pass by, sees the beauty in her that her work and her world denies her. Thus, the speaker does what the dish water does not.