Four short images make up this untitled poem, and none of them is explained. It begins with "lost prayers" sent up beneath the Big Dipper, as if the speaker has been sending wishes into the night sky without any sense that they arrive. Then the view drops to the ground: a snowy field under the stars, slowly darkening into the woods. The last image is the smallest and the gentlest, the faint prints of birds that have been feeding near a faded azalea.
The speaker never says what they feel, but the mood is quiet, hushed, and a little sad. "Lost" and "faded" appear twice in different forms, so loss hangs over the scene. Yet the bird tracks suggest life carrying on in the cold. The poem seems to move from the vast and unanswerable, the sky and the prayers, toward something small and real that can actually be seen. The ending leaves us with that fragile evidence of life, and no conclusion.