Winter Road is a quiet snapshot of a roadside in the dead of winter. Nothing happens in it, really. The speaker simply looks and lists: pavement bleached pale by weeks of salt, a ditch where ice has frozen around the feathers of a bird, a gray ridge of snow left behind by a plow, and a stalk of phragmites, a tall marsh grass, shaking each time a truck rushes past.
The speaker never says how they feel, and that restraint is part of the effect. The details are bleak and a little grim. The "jack-knifed feathers" suggest a dead bird, though the poem doesn't spell it out, and the verb "stitches" makes the ice look almost like careful handiwork on something broken. The mood is cold, spare, and watchful. Human traffic and machinery dominate the scene, while the grass can only sway in their wake. The poem leaves us with a sense of how small and fragile living things are beside the road.