Written as a letter to someone named Teju, this poem follows a walk along a dry ridge where the speaker looks under rocks and finds very little: burrows, panicked ants, more stones. Then a bear's trail takes over. The bear flips rocks as a matter of course, and the speaker jokes that only a human, awkward in the world, would bother to put one back. That joke leads into a bigger idea: culture isn't ours alone. Birds build nests, songbirds must be taught their songs, and instinct leans on improvisation.
The final turn is to a child playing in a creek with a stick, imagining things into the moving water. The speaker finds this more wondrous than gold. The mood begins quietly curious and a little wry, then grows warm and almost giddy, and the closing exclamation, "this human being!", reads as a burst of delight. The speaker isn't putting humans above animals so much as marveling at what imagination looks like in a child.