A speaker wanders through a hillside cemetery on Halloween eve, and the scene is oddly ordinary. A woman walks her rottweiler, a gravedigger works a small backhoe, and the speaker idly reads the headstones the way you might scan books in a shop. The poem's images keep turning the landscape into something bodily and slightly threatening: gravestones look like stumps, or like teeth waiting for a jaw to close.
The mood is quiet and wry, with an uneasy edge. The speaker feels a flicker of guilt when one headstone says "GIVEN" and he realizes he is just killing time among the dead. Then the poem shifts its gaze to a nearby mountain, and the stumps return, now as a "rash" of fresh clear-cutting. The poem seems to suggest that graves and felled trees are linked, since both are losses made routine. The speaker tries not to look, which says as much about his discomfort as any outright statement could.