Home, the poem begins, is "a reckoning / with my eyes", and the odd preposition matters. The speaker does not say home is seen through the eyes, or judged by them. Home is something to be settled with them, as if the eyes were a stubborn creditor, or an opponent across a table. "Reckoning" carries several meanings at once: a calculation, a bill that has to be paid, and a moment of judgment. All three fit a poem that is quietly about accounting for what has been lost.
What has been lost is "all the garden". The relative clause "which exed out" most naturally attaches to the eyes, though the grammar leaves a little room for doubt. "Exed out" is a plain, slightly comic verb, made from the letter itself. Judging by the idiom, it echoes crossing an item off a list or clicking the X to close a window on a screen. Either way, it is a dismissive gesture. It takes no time and leaves no ruins. Set beside the soft word "garden", it sounds brisk and almost careless. The eyes did not mourn the garden or study it. They struck it out, the way a renovation plan strikes out whatever stands in the way of the new design. The title suggests, though the poem never says, that some rebuilding is under way, and that the garden has been written off to make room for it.
The last couplet turns the poem on its head. Having wiped out the garden, the eyes "still expect a change / in one night." The small word "still" carries the irony. These same eyes made the erasure, yet they behave like a child who has planted nothing and wakes expecting flowers. Real renovation, and real gardens, work slowly. The poem imagines a mind that wants the benefits of transformation without its duration, and it places the blame on how we look rather than on the builders or the weather. The title helps here. "Renovation" comes from the Latin for making new, and the poem shows how impatient that desire can be. The speaker also seems to catch himself, since "my eyes" keeps the guilt in the first person.
The form is quietly exact. There are three couplets and a single sentence, with no punctuation and no capital letters, so the poem runs on without a full stop and feels like a thought slipping out. The line lengths mirror each other. The first couplet runs six syllables then three ("home is a reckoning / with my eyes"), the middle one three then four, and the last six then three again ("and still expect a change / in one night"). The short middle couplet is where the garden disappears, and the poem is shortest exactly where the destruction happens. Each couplet ends on a small, hard-edged phrase, "my eyes", "the garden", "one night", and the line breaks do real work. The poem pauses after "reckoning" and after "expect a change", so the reader briefly hopes before the next line deflates it.
There is no end rhyme, but the sound is carefully tuned. The cluster of k and x sounds in "reckoning", "exed" and "expect" links the three key words, so that the reckoning, the erasure and the false hope seem to belong to one chain of cause and effect. The long "i" of "eyes" returns in "night", which bookends the poem: the instrument of looking at the start, the darkness that cannot change anything at the end. The tenses shift as well. "Home is" and "still expect" are in the present, while "exed out" is in the past, so the poem's whole story sits between a finished act and an ongoing, unreasonable hope.
Part of what makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in about twenty words. It treats home as a way of seeing that can be unlearned and relearned, rather than as a building or an address. Its images are modern and unsentimental, and it avoids the usual lament over a lost garden. It admits something less flattering: the eyes want the old thing gone and the new thing present at once. Anyone who has tried to change a room, a habit, or themselves and then been disappointed by the next morning will recognise the mistake, and the poem presents it in a few lines without explaining it.