A walk in the park at dusk is about as ordinary as an experience gets, and the poem treats it that way until the ground gives way. Within a few lines the speaker is looking at "soil / Partly hole," and the walk turns into something else. The central idea is that life and death are not in separate places. They share the same patch of earth, and the speaker, still moving and still breathing, is already heading toward the second one.
The key image is small and unsettling: "Over it some grasses, / Like life on the death." The grass is a thin green lid over an opening, and life looks like a surface, something laid on top of what is underneath. The phrase "the death" is strange. We normally say "death" or "a death," and the definite article makes it sound like a particular object or place the speaker has just stumbled on. The grammar is unsteady elsewhere too ("Near the way soil"). Whatever the reason, the effect is of thoughts arriving in pieces, as when the mind is caught off guard.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem is built from spacing and silence. Stanzas shrink to a single line ("Somewhere away", "In the silence.", "In the dusk light,"), and each one works like a pause in the walk. The traffic is dismissed in a line that feels half-finished: "Comes the hum of the street; traffic." The semicolon bolts the word "traffic" on like a label, and the whole busy human world shrinks to a noise in the distance. Then comes "silence," although the hum has only just been heard. The silence seems to be the speaker's own, the quiet that opens when attention turns inward.
The emotional hinge is the cluster "There is life / Here's death / What tragic, // Tragicomic..." The exclamation "What tragic," breaks off, and the speaker corrects it with a stranger word, followed by an ellipsis. Why comic? The poem does not say, but the surrounding images suggest an answer. Grass grows cheerfully over a hole, cars hum along, and a person solemnly contemplates mortality while carrying on with an evening stroll. Grief and absurdity sit side by side, and the trailing dots leave the speaker unable to choose between them.
The ending depends on small shifts. The verb "walking" appears three times, and its destination keeps changing: "in the park," then "to street side," then "to death." The preposition does the work. The park is a place, but the street and death are places to be reached. It is a little surprising that the street, where the traffic hums, becomes the stage for the final line, so that the noise of living is also the direction of dying. This is an inference, but the poem seems to suggest that nothing in this walk leads anywhere else. Then comes "Step, step." These two stressed beats are the closest thing the poem has to metre, and they pick up the earlier "voices of my steps." The footsteps work almost like a pulse or a clock, and the poem stops with them rather than with a conclusion.
A count of the words shows the weighting. "Death" appears four times and "life" only twice, and one of those appearances has life resting on top of death like the grass. Nothing in the vocabulary is grand: park, soil, grass, street, steps. The poem makes no claims about what death means or what follows it. It simply notices that an evening walk contains it, in the gap in the ground and in the rhythm of one's own feet.
That restraint gives the poem its interest for a reader. It avoids the usual solemn language about mortality and relies on plain words, awkward and exposed, so that the thought seems to occur to the speaker as we read. The structure also acts out the content: short lines, sudden stops, and a final rhythm that is nothing but walking. A reader finishes the poem hearing their own steps, and probably wondering where they are going.