The speaker holds a gummy bear and studies it as if it were a strange object from another world. The German title, "Gummibärchen," means "little gummy bears," and the poem plays on the word "bear" throughout. The candy is "bear medicine," as lumpy and unreadable as a carved stone fetish, and as chewy as an eraser. The speaker wonders where it came from, what "distant deeps / or skies" might be locked inside it, and what furnace made it. The trailing "etc." suggests a shrug, as though the questions could go on forever.
Then the tone shifts. Something from childhood has "grown strange," and the speaker has grown up too, into a world with "so much / that's unbearable." The last lines pun on "bear" and "bare," ending on "the bare necessities of life." The mood is wry and a little wistful: playful on the surface, but with a quiet sadness about how ordinary things lose their innocence as we age.