The speaker walks through Fitchburg at night and notices how little is lit. Only a few street lights work, and a drunk young man in a neighbor's yard once promised, as a joke or a mayoral campaign, to turn them all on. Tonight they are mostly off again. The one bright spot is a row of small solar garden lights bought at the dollar store, glowing faintly along a path.
From there the speaker's mind drifts to the places that are also dark and still: the library with its Hmong-English dictionary and a Pete Seeger record, the DTA office, the schools, the closed planetarium. Trains still arrive from Boston, and the speaker wonders who is on them, here at the end of the line.
The mood is quiet, a little melancholy, but also gentle and accepting. The last lines turn the darkness into something almost comforting: with nowhere to go, the town doesn't need its lights.