Dave Bonta's short poem circles around a single odd object: the fetish. The speaker treats it as something we can't really handle or hold, even though it has a shape, all "lump & twist & rag-end." It's awkward and a little ugly, which is why it's "best kept out of view." Seeing it clearly isn't easy, either. You would have to take on the weight of where it came from and, in the poem's words, "remake oneself."
The poem then moves backward in time, first to a "buried season, carboniferous," an image of deep, ancient layers of earth, and then to the womb. The closing line, calling the fetish "the solid shadow we abandoned," suggests it is something we once carried and then left behind, which now haunts us. The mood is cool, strange, and a bit uneasy. The speaker sounds less like someone confessing than someone examining a buried thing, with fascination and some wariness.