The speaker is looking after a dead person's little dog and the garden, and the poem slowly shows that this private grief is tangled up with a larger one. The person who died has been buried and their belongings sold, yet the speaker says "there will be no ending." Mourning here doesn't finish; it settles into the body, as the last line puts it: "You are in my bones."
Alongside this, the poem keeps noticing a damaged natural world: warmer springs, stranger snow, harsh or missing rain, dead bats, oceans with "no place to go." The speaker admits not knowing "how to use power," which suggests helplessness in the face of both loss and climate change. The mood is quiet, weary, and anxious. Short, plain lines and small details, like worms and starlings, make the sadness feel ordinary and close, while "Only one way out" leaves a bleak, unsettled edge.