A man goes out walking on a Sunday, and the day already feels wrong. "Night welling up / at noon" suggests a darkness rising from inside him as much as falling from the sky. Midday should be bright, but his mood has turned it to night.
He walks west, the direction of sunset and endings, and hears "a poor, dry sermon / in a reed." There is no church here, only a rustling plant, and the poem makes it a meagre kind of preaching. Nature offers no comfort, just a thin, brittle sound. The Sunday setting hints at the religious comfort he isn't finding.
The last lines are the most unsettling. He walks home "to see who might / hang himself." The phrasing is odd and cold, as if he were watching himself from a distance. The speaker seems numb, even darkly curious about his own despair. The mood is bleak, quiet, and eerie, and the poem's brevity makes it feel even starker.