Dave Bonta's poem is a quiet walk through a stand of trees, and it seems to be a place the speaker knows well. The spruces are "aging" and "still stand where we planted them," so there is a shared history here, a "we" who put them in the ground. The opening "ark ark" reads like a raven's call, and the line about "so many ways of saying here / in Raven" suggests the speaker is listening to the birds as a language of place.
The images that follow are small and close to the ground: roots pushing up, rings of mushrooms between the rows, a single fern waving. Everything seems to be growing, rotting, and feeding something else. The last lines turn to shaggy manes, mushrooms known for dissolving themselves, and the speaker imagines "the sweet release / of autodigestion." The mood is calm, observant, and a little wry. Decay is treated as a gentle relief rather than something frightening.