The speaker walks or sits in a forest in autumn, and the beauty around him is tangled up with dread. The title, "End Times," hints at why: the red and scarlet oaks, the glowing treetops, even the speaker's own thinning hair all suggest things coming to an end. He admits he isn't ready for a "light-filled forest," as if so much brightness is too much to face.
The poem keeps pulling the large and the small together. A nickel in his pocket carries a slaveowner's face, and he jokes that he's like Lewis and Clark, a small, uneasy nod to history and conquest. Falling acorns tick like a clock, and he counts his own "caught breaths." Then the view widens to coal, hell, and shifting mountains, suggesting how belief and time can turn a living forest into fuel.
The ending is quiet and sad. The treetops glow in sun they "can no longer taste," so the beauty he watches may already be hollow. The mood is anxious, wry, and mournful.