The speaker walks along railroad ties and feels as though she is borrowing her father's body to do it. She steps on his legs and sees through his eyes, and what she notices is small and stubborn: cracked mussel shells wedged between pilings, blackberry vines pushing up through concrete and winding around fence posts. The poem suggests her father is no longer simply a person beside her but a presence she carries, a way of seeing.
Nature and the father blur together. The vines "enterweave" earth and sky and push back the city, and the father's eyes become "star eyes," his hands "rock and moss." The final lines turn the highway into something that can be seeded again, as if growth will quietly win the ground back.
The mood is tender, reverent, and a little defiant. There is love and perhaps loss in the speaker's closeness to her father, but also a steady hope that living things, and the people who taught us to notice them, endure.