Where a title should be, the poem has only a row of asterisks, so we arrive in the middle of a scene, the way you notice a shadow before you work out what is casting it. The first line acts out exactly that order: "the shadows around the corner before / the cars." The shadows get there first, and the break after "before" makes us wait a beat for the cars, as someone standing at the kerb would. Right away the poem seems less interested in describing a street than in making us feel how a street is seen: in glimpses, slightly ahead of or behind the thing itself.
There is no punctuation and no capital letter anywhere, and the grammar refuses to sit still. "there's the back windows too slow / moment" can be read several ways: slow windows, a slow moment, or a stray phrase the eye catches and moves on from. Meaning settles a little when "away from / the setting sun" arrives. Shadows fall away from the sun, so the phrase quietly supplies the time of day, low light and long shadows. Those shadows then become the subject of a verb: they "project tall bug- / gye flickering past / trees." "Project" does double duty. Shadows throw a shape, but the word also suggests a projector, and "flickering" is the language of old film. Light broken up by trunks and branches would stutter just like that.
The word "buggy" is split across a line break and spelled strangely, "gye". Reading down, we meet "bug" first, something small, and only then does the word swell into a "tall" shape. The odd spelling makes it look unfamiliar, as things do when we catch them out of the corner of an eye. Whether the shape is a carriage or the stretched outline of a car, the poem doesn't say, and the vagueness suits a shadow, which is only ever the outline of something else.
With no rhyme and no regular beat, the rhythm comes from line length. The first two lines are crowded, the second carrying eight words, as if traffic were rushing past. Then the lines thin out: "moment" sits alone, then "away from," then "the setting sun." A one-word line is a physical pause on the page, so the "moment" is given room to last, which is a neat answer to the "too slow" just before it. Sound works more quietly. The hard k-sounds of "corner," "cars," "back," "bug," and "flickering" click through the first half like the flicker they describe, while the second half softens into "seasons," "over," "road." Even "shadows" and "windows" share an ending, a faint echo in a poem that otherwise avoids rhyme.
The last five lines change the scale of time. "trees" stands alone, and then comes "changed here / through the seasons / over the road / branched out." After the quick flicker of the shadow, the poem steps back to the slow work that made it possible. The trees have changed through the seasons and spread their branches over the road, and that spreading is why the light stutters when something passes. Speed depends on slowness: the flicker lasts a second, but it was built over years. "Changed" and "branched" also sound alike, as though one led naturally into the other. "Branched out" works as a final image for the poem too, since its sentences have been splitting into side-paths all along. There is no full stop, so the branching is left open.
The poem is worth reading because it gives us no speaker saying "I saw," no explanation, and no moral. It hands over the experience of looking and trusts us to put the pieces together. A rush-hour corner at sunset becomes strange and a little cinematic, and a shadow gets more attention than the cars that cast it. Reading it aloud shows how much the line breaks control your breathing, and that control is how it slows down a moment you would normally let flicker past.