Two people begin as children whose whole world is eight blocks wide, close enough that a voice can reach across it by citizens' band radio. As they grow up, that world stretches past the state line, but the connection holds: the friend still phones the speaker's house on quiet evenings. Then the speaker learns how vast and restless the universe really is, expanding faster and faster, galaxies swallowing one another, the sun shrinking to a speck of dust. Nothing feels the same afterward.
The title, "Red Shift," points to light stretching as things move apart, and the poem lets distance work as both science and feeling. The final scene is quietly sad. From a plane, the speaker sees the friend as a tiny figure at a car door, and neither can really know the other's path. The friend mistakes the speaker's shadow for a bird. The mood is wistful and hushed, a tender closeness slowly pulled thin by scale.