Four floors above the street, the speaker watches a procession that looks almost manufactured: umbrellas "slid past each other with / assembly-line perfection." The phrase turns pedestrians into products on a conveyor belt. Their colors, mostly "black & blue" with "the occasional red, yellow, / lime-green," are the only individuality the scene allows, and even those are carried along. The wet street "shone / like a mirror that gives / nothing back." The simile is all surface, reflecting without returning anything, much as the crowd moves without arriving anywhere we can see. Then comes a flat fragment, "The hiss of tires," and the sound of the city has the last word.
The next line explains why the scene feels so mechanical: "This short loop keeps playing / in my head." The speaker is not only watching but replaying, as if the mind had become a looping video. The poem then shifts without announcing it. A cloud lifts, a moth appears, trees drip, and later there is "deep grass." The poem never says the speaker has gone downstairs. Judging by the imagery, the umbrella scene is something remembered or replayed, while the present is wetter, slower and closer to the ground.
The moth is the hinge. It is "caught out after daybreak," a creature in the wrong hour, "yawing & veering." Those verbs belong to ships and aircraft, and they sound oddly grand for something so small and clumsy. The moth is the opposite of the umbrellas. It is imperfect, off schedule and unmistakably alive. "Caught out" is also a human idiom for being surprised by weather, so the speaker may be quietly recognizing himself.
Only then does the poem state its case, in the plainest language it has: "This summer won't come again. / Why spend it en route / to somewhere else?" The title promised a decision, but the poem gives reasons through images and keeps argument to a single question. "En route" is the stiff vocabulary of itineraries, and it defines travel as time spent in transit, another version of the loop. The line break after it leaves "to somewhere else" dangling, so the destination is literally pushed to the next line.
The ending is the poem's real answer. The verbs "pluck," "place" and "palm" are gentle, tactile and alliterative, and they slow the reading down. The snail "makes a slow circuit / on its single foot." The word "circuit" echoes the earlier "loop," but the loop is now the size of a hand and moves at a pace the speaker can enjoy. A snail is also a strange traveler, always moving and never leaving home. In a poem with no regular meter, ending on "foot" is hard to hear without thinking of the metrical unit, as though the verse itself had slowed to a single step.
The form supports all of this. The poem is one unbroken 22-line stanza with no rhyme, and its short lines rely on enjambment. Splitting "fourth- / floor" across a line break lets the lines slide past one another the way the umbrellas do. The ampersands make the text look quick and casual on the page. Sound shifts too, from the sibilance of "slid," "street shone" and "hiss" to the softer, rounder ending.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could easily have lectured about busyness, but it never scolds. It sets a perfect, empty pattern beside an erratic moth and a slow snail, then lets the reader see which one has more life in it. The first half is fast, visual and external, and the second is slow, physical and close. The speaker's decision to stay is shown by the shape of the poem as much as by what it says, and it ends with the speaker holding something small and watching it go around.