Nothing much happens in the alley behind the diner, and that is exactly the point. Two night-shift workers take a break, one of them is about to leave, and the poem lets us watch the small, unspoken weight of that fact. Its central idea is the gap between what people say and what they feel at the edge of a change. She is moving on to a better life. He is staying, and talking himself into believing that staying is a choice.
The conversation is handled with great restraint. We learn it secondhand, as something the two are "still replaying." The baker will leave "in less than a month" for a desk "in a tall glass rectangle / next to the interstate." That phrase is flat and geometric, and the glass and the highway suggest transparency and transit, a life of passing through. The prep cook's reply, "I'd do / the same," is generous, but the line break leaves "the same" dangling for a moment, and the poem moves quickly on to his own plans. Dialogue is never put in quotation marks. Speech slides into narration, which makes everything feel overheard, as if the speaker were standing in the alley too.
That speaker has a personality. The word "shapely" in the first line is a slightly leering way to introduce a colleague, and it prepares us for the sly aside later: the cook is promised hours "where the action is — / not to mention (& he didn't) / the waitresses." The parenthesis is the poem's quiet joke, and it also hints at what the cook doesn't say. Judging by the details, his real interest may lie closer to hand than the waitresses. "Tired of preparation" works as a pun, since he is a prep cook and perhaps tired of life as a rehearsal. Yet "the line" he longs for is only another station in the same kitchen. The "action" he wants is more of the same work, nearer the heat.
Sound does a great deal of work here. The poem is in unrhymed free verse, in three stanzas of nearly equal length, and its rhythm follows speech and breath rather than a metre. Enjambment carries sentences across the lines the way the characters drift between thoughts. Against the human talk we hear the "robins waking" and the "rattle of the manhole cover" as cars pass. The cigarette gets its own onomatopoeia, "pah . . . fff . . .," where the spaced ellipses stretch the sound out and slow the poem to the pace of a break. The ampersands, used three times, give the page a hurried, jotted look, like an order scribbled on a ticket, and this fits a world of shift work and quick exchanges.
The best writing is in the final lines. Earlier the rolls are "cooling in the doorway," a neutral and almost cozy picture. By the end they "harden / in their metal beds." Nobody comments on this, but we can read it as time passing and chances going stale while the two people talk about other things. The baker's "I'm getting goose pimples" is an ordinary remark about the cold, and it may also be a way of changing the subject. Then comes the closing simile: "Dawn settles / over everything like fine flour." It is the right image for the setting, since flour is what a baker works in. It also has an odd double effect. Flour is soft and gentle, but it is also a dust that covers and evens things out. The new day arrives kindly, and it also quietly buries what wasn't said.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to turn this scene into a drama. There is no confession and no argument, and nobody's future is spelled out beyond a job and a hope. Yet by the end we feel the difference between the one who leaves and the one who stays, and the tenderness between them that neither names. The poem pays attention to ordinary working people at an ordinary hour, and it finds enough in that attention, in the sounds, the cold and the light, to leave a reader thinking about it afterwards.