A morning walk around Green Lake becomes a meditation on loss and change. The speaker takes the Day of the Dead as a lens, and suddenly everything she passes looks like an altar: trees, asters, rosehips, sleeping mallards, even a stroller's scattered baby shoes. Nature here is both beautiful and brutal. Insects eat leaves, birds eat insects, and a fallen nest lies in the water.
Out on the lake, rowers glide past, and the speaker thinks of her dead parents. Her father, she imagines, might leave her a better memory if he were put in a racing shell. Her mother, who never learned to swim, appears treading water and smiling. Her daughter once rowed here, and now her grandson rows elsewhere, so the poem also traces loss and continuity across generations.
The mood is quiet, reflective, and gently accepting. Change feels natural, like maple leaves falling "as predicted," and the faint moon overhead ends the poem on calm.