The poem is a series of quiet observations made while looking closely at trees in a woods. The speaker notices an old beech whose bark bunches in folds, like clothes that don't quite fit, and a hemlock with a zigzag scar whose edges have healed over like closed lips. Then comes a joke: a bend in a tree's growth becomes its "mid-life crisis," a human phrase that makes the tree's curve feel gently comic and graceful at once.
The final lines turn more mysterious. The "vanishing distance" between two positions suggests two trees, an oak and a hemlock, slowly growing toward each other, and the last line fuses their names into one word, "oakhemlock." The poem seems to enjoy the way patient looking erases boundaries, between human and tree, and between one tree and another. The mood is calm, attentive, and lightly humorous, with a sense of time moving slowly.