Nobody in this poem answers the question it half asks. "who is concerned / for the foolery of fashion" has no question mark and no capital letter, so it hangs between a challenge and a shrug. The poem then moves in three steps: a glance at fashion and money, a stanza in which "we" turn nature into business, and a final retreat to an owl and some cold air. Its central idea is that we habitually translate the living world into the language of value, yet a few things, like a bird in the dark or a lungful of winter, stay stubbornly outside that language and are the only things worth being sure of.
The first stanza sets up the target with a sneer you can hear in the sounds. "Foolery of fashion" is a pair of f-words that sound faintly mocking. Then comes "green and pretty as money," a simile that quietly steals the colour of leaves for the colour of cash. "Green" also means naïve or inexperienced, so the phrase can be read as a dig at fashion's gullibility as well as its glamour. It is also unclear whether "green and pretty" describes the fashion, the foolery, or both, and that blur suits a world where everything has been blended into one shiny surface. The simile ends on "money," a soft, unstressed word that lets the line fade away, as though the speaker can't be bothered to say more.
The second stanza is the pivot, and it is the shortest. "we look at nature / and home in on business" does a lot with plain words. "Look" is leisurely, but "home in" is purposeful, the language of a missile or a pigeon. "Home" is a word we associate with belonging, and here it is put to work for hunting. A glance at the natural world sharpens into an appraisal, and "business" lands flat and blunt, with no softening adjective. The "we" matters too, because the speaker isn't pointing at some distant villain. The reader is included in the habit.
Then the poem does something unexpected. The last stanza has no verb of its own: "sure of the owl / and the goodness of air / so cold and so close." Without punctuation, "sure" can attach to the earlier "we," as if the same people who home in on business are also sure of the owl. That could be irony, or it could be a hope that the two kinds of attention can live in one person. Either way, the owl is a well-chosen thing to be sure of. It is usually heard before it is seen, a presence in the dark that can't be priced or styled. "Goodness" is an old, almost childlike moral word, set against the cold vocabulary of money. Air belongs to no one, which makes it the opposite of everything in the first stanza.
The last line is the most carefully made. "So cold and so close" repeats "so" and leans on the long o-sounds of "so," "cold," and "close," which slows the line to a hush. Cold is not usually called good, but here it is, because it is felt rather than owned. "Close" works physically, since air is the one thing pressed right up against the skin, and perhaps emotionally too, in contrast to fashion's distance and glitter.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters, and the stanzas run three lines, two lines, three lines, with the squeezed middle as the hinge. The lines are short and loosely paced, so each phrase gets room to ring. The missing full stops let the stanzas lean into one another, so the reader decides where to pause.
The title adds a final twist. Ephemera are things made to be thrown away, and fashion and money fit that description well. But an owl's call and a breath of cold air are fleeting too. The poem seems to suggest that what matters is not how long something lasts but whether it is real and close enough to trust.
That is much of the poem's significance. It makes an ecological and moral point without lecturing, and it does so by letting a few well-placed words, "green," "home," "business," and "goodness," carry the argument. It also shows how little a poem needs, and how much one idiom bent slightly out of shape can reveal about how we see.