The speaker looks back on a woman’s final season of life—a summer that nobody, including the speaker, recognized as her last. At the time, they mistook her increased, gentle busyness for a fresh surge of energy, a new lease on life. What they were actually seeing was the opposite: the compressed urgency that can come when death is close. The poem captures that sickening moment of hindsight, when the “hurry” that once seemed like vitality is suddenly legible as a countdown.
The mood is regretful and a little bitter, aimed inward. The speaker calls their own blindness “stupidity” and “duller than our dullness,” and the only signpost they missed was the cold marble of an imagined tombstone—the Carrara guide post. While the dying woman was frantically finishing whatever she needed to finish, the living were taking their time, leisurely and oblivious. There’s no comfort offered, just a quiet, self-lacerating honesty about how easily we misread the quiet preparations of someone leaving.