The poem walks us up a rough logging trail and into a clearing beside a swamp, then holds us there under a brutal sun. The speaker seems to be a watcher, noting details rather than explaining feelings, but the feeling comes through anyway: this is a place that is hot, close, and slightly menacing. The wind "maims" the scrub and "feints" at the plants, as if the landscape were a fight. Three hawks circle overhead, "fibering air," a phrase that makes them seem to stitch the sky together.
Then the focus drops into the brown water, where silt settles and larvae leave tracks in the mud. The line breaks slow the reading down until "breath nears fever / halts altogether." The heat is almost too much to take in. The mood is tense, sultry, and hushed. The final line breaks that hush with a burst of motion, as wind skids across the whole half mile of swamp.