Fogarty is a poem about the last member of a family standing at its graves. The opening image is of a family history carved into rock, which suggests a gravestone or memorial with six windows, each one a name or a life, all looking up toward heaven. The graveyard becomes a "corpse garden" full of "corpse flowers," a grim, strange picture of death as something that grows and blooms.
Then the focus shifts to Fogarty himself. Twelve broken hips suggest a body worn down by pain, and the poem says that pain kept him silent. He only "spoke" once he joined the others, which could mean his death, or the moment he grieves at the stone. The final image, his hands drawing blood from stone, is the most striking. It could mean he scrapes at the rock in grief, or that carving the names costs him physically.
The speaker stays quiet and observant, and the mood is bleak, stark and heavy with loss, though also strangely tender.