Three small scenes from a spring garden sit side by side, and the poem lets them speak to each other. Across the road, phoebes carry mud to build a nest. The speaker plants onions and ends up with black crescents of soil under his nails. Then he looks ahead to summer, when he'll be away and the walking onions will replant themselves, head-down in the dirt.
What ties these together is work done with earth. The birds build, the speaker plants, and the onions, which seem to take their own steps, need no one at all. The speaker doesn't say how he feels outright, but the tone suggests quiet contentment, maybe with a touch of humility. He is part of this busy season, yet the garden will carry on without him. The mood is calm and observant, grounded in small physical details like mud, fingernails and soil, and it finds something comforting in how self-sufficient living things can be.