The speaker notices an overturned wheelbarrow rotting under a pile of brush beside a neat house, and the sight sets off a larger thought: nobody can keep their world in good repair, and everything decays. Walking on what they take to be Thoreau's old railbed, they pass a graveyard stretching on and on, full of lives that came and went. Yet there is a small consolation. Those dead people left behind headstone-carvers who outlived them, so some kind of work always continues.
The poem then circles back to the wheelbarrow. Someone once made it new, and that simple fact seems to matter to the speaker. The closing questions, whether anyone is building a wheelbarrow today or will tomorrow, feel half practical and half anxious. The mood is quiet, reflective, and a little melancholy, but not hopeless. The speaker's longing is for proof that ordinary making and usefulness keep going, even as things fall apart.