The speaker is hidden in a forest, waiting and listening for a girl named Eileen, who walks slowly through an empty place. He doesn't step forward. He stays "in the corner of her eyes," present but unseen, more watcher than companion. The poem is as interested in who Eileen will become as in who she is now.
Midway through, the speaker fills the page with small animals: a rabbit crossing a frosty field, a marmot under a stone, a raccoon begging in Yosemite Valley, a chipmunk on the summit of Goddard. They seem to be the creatures he waits among, and perhaps he sees himself in their shyness and stillness.
The ending looks ahead to a time "when the world is changed," when Eileen and everyone else will dance with these beings in every direction. The mood is quiet and tender, a little hushed, with a hopeful, almost dreamlike wish for a world where people and animals belong together.