The speaker recalls leaving years ago. After only two or three steps, the door shut behind them — anxiously, as if whoever remained was quick to seal the gap. That sound has echoed in their ears ever since, and now every closing door sounds like the clatter of pebbles on a coffin, like a coffin lid coming down.
The poem turns an ordinary moment into something final and funereal. The departure feels, in hindsight, like a death — of a relationship, perhaps, or of the life left behind. The speaker never explains what happened after that anxious closing, but the grief has attached itself to the very act of a door shutting. What remains is a mood of quiet dread and regret, a haunting by a sound that cannot be unheard. The speaker has come to hate the closing of doors because each one replays that one irreversible goodbye.