The poem begins with a thought arriving like weather: "That the neighborhood might be covered / by one roof, occured / this morning." Grammatically, the idea comes first and its verb is held back until the second line, so we feel it dawn on the speaker. The snow on the ground is the obvious cause. It levels a street into a single white surface and picks out what stands above it: "phonepoles, flagpoles, / windows, so many chimneys." These are ordinary, man-made verticals, counted off with the pleasure of someone who has just noticed how much is there. The "one roof" is more than snow, though. It also describes what the poem tries to do, which is to hold a scatter of perceptions under a single cover.
That cover is loose and keeps slipping. After the first few lines the syntax loosens, and the poem moves by juxtaposition rather than argument. "The tides, clouds from the past / vanishing rain / the base. / beaten out," gives phrases that could attach to what comes before or after, and the almost total lack of punctuation lets them do both. The lines are short and uneven, with no rhyme and no regular meter. Instead, the poem works through sound and echo: "phonepoles, flagpoles"; the repeated "clouds"; the hard, percussive "broken off" and "beaten out." The line breaks mark where a glance or a breath stops, not where a sentence ends. Reading it feels like looking out of a window and letting your eyes land on one thing after another.
Time is one of the things that gets gathered. The poem starts in snow, but "screens in summer to keep the flies out" arrives without warning, and then a vine "which in autumn / looks as if it still might hold / somebody's backs." The seasons sit side by side as if memory and present sight were the same view. The odd phrase "clouds from the past" suggests this too. The vine is a good example of the poem's imagery. It is described through a hesitant "looks as if… might," and it turns into a frame or a rack, something that could still carry a load. "Encroached saw, horses / angling out" adds a jumble of workshop objects, perhaps sawhorses, though the poem leaves that open. The "open garage doors" suggest a household turned inside out and exposed to the weather.
The most striking detail is also the strangest: "a spiderweb hitched the dictionary / overnight, I left it out there." The most natural reading is that a book of words has been left outdoors and a spider has fastened its own construction to it. A dictionary is human order, a catalogue of everything sayable, and the web is an order made by an animal overnight, delicate and purposeful. The speaker doesn't comment, but the image sits at the poem's center like a small statement about how patterns get made. Nearby, a darker line cuts in: "death when you don't want it what you like / is a plain object." Its grammar can be read more than one way, and the poem doesn't resolve it. The sudden mention of death, set among clouds and garage doors, gives the whole scene an edge.
The ending turns on the poem's one outright wish: "you want the hills to rise." Right after it come "twigs / levelled on against the sky," a flat, horizontal image that answers the wish by refusing to rise. The last two lines, "After 3 days the air / empty from the rain," don't tie everything together. They leave a cleared space, and the emptiness reads more as relief than loss, like the quiet after a storm.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it hands part of the work to us. The speaker's opening thought about one roof is never confirmed by an argument. We are given poles, chimneys, a vine, a web and a washed-out sky, and the roof only holds if we do the covering ourselves. That is its quiet point: attention is a kind of shelter, and a poem can be built from what one person notices on one morning, without a plot or a moral. It rewards slow reading because every phrase has to be weighed against its neighbors, and because the gaps between them are part of what it means.