Autumn here is lovely, but it never feels safe. The opening image of gold-coral leaves suggests colors so rich and fleeting that a single day can't contain them. Beauty is already slipping away as the speaker looks at it.
Then the mood turns. Hunters' gunshots break the quiet, and the speaker says they "shrink for graceful deer," as if feeling the fear of the animals themselves. Even the radios seem to "shoot the sky," so the noise of the season becomes a kind of violence. The third stanza pushes toward winter: cold kills off the "sweaty yellow heat" of summer, snow approaches, and the sun grows pale and disappears.
The poem ends on a small act of defiance. Sap, the tree's life, is "still kicking against frost." The mood is wistful and uneasy, but the closing note is stubborn survival rather than surrender.