Mike Stone's poem looks at one man, the speaker's father, from three angles, and each gives a different picture. In the first, the speaker imagines him as a Mongol khan, with ghostly riders thundering down the hills toward the lone house. It's a wild, violent fantasy, and the father is both frightening and grand, carrying a book against his heart. The speaker says he has "not a tear" to give him, which suggests guilt or distance. In the second view, the myth shrinks to a quiet dinner. He reads while eating soup, she reads the news, and nobody talks. In the third, a neighbor offers the kind of vague praise people give someone they never knew: "a nice man," private, "a little hard to get to know."
The mood is lonely and hushed. Silence ends each section, and by the last line it feels like a presence in its own right. The poem suggests that a person can seem huge inside a family and almost invisible outside it, and that even those closest may never really reach him.