The poem catches a single moment on the first hot day of the year, when the speaker is out in the woods looking for mushrooms. It begins high up, with tall tulip poplars whose small new leaves are held up to the light. The "four incisors" is a funny, precise image: the young leaves have pointed lobes, like little teeth. Then the poem turns to the sun, which "doesn't stand a chance" against all that fresh growth, though it still manages to burn the speaker's neck, as if a sunset were being staged there.
The final lines bring us down to the ground. Crouching, the speaker studies a yellow morel, whose pitted surface looks like a "maze of roads." The mood is quiet, curious, and a little playful. The speaker seems pleased rather than hurried, happy to be warm, outdoors, and absorbed in small details. The poem moves from the huge to the tiny, and that shift makes the world feel both vast and intimate.