The speaker looks back at a childhood spent mostly in his own head, playing a role he wrote for himself. In his imagined story there is a hero who rescues girls and settles scores with his fists, and the speaker, a self-described pacifist and a shy boy, never thinks about how tiring that hero's job might be. The poem finds humor in this, letting the hero talk back. Real, unplanned moments are rare in his memory, and the one he does recall is a failure: wrecked kites in a wild mountain wind.
Then the poem jumps to late summer, when he is forty. The katydids' chorus brings his childhood back, and the mood turns drowsy and slightly uneasy. He presses a cold watermelon to his stomach, calling it "one sightless eyeball" meeting another, which is a strange, funny image of closeness. The ending darkens: distance will "dissolve," and the moon rises a "lurid red." The poem seems to sense time running out, even as it savors the season's sweetness.