Mike Stone's short poem begins with a strange confession: seeing pretty girls makes the speaker homesick. The feeling doesn't point to a real place. Instead, beauty seems to remind him of a world of love he imagines he was born into, then exiled from, leaving him in a country of ugliness and despair. That sense of loss sets the poem's lonely mood.
The images that follow stay with that ache. A bridge crosses his loneliness but leads "from nowhere to nowhere," so there is no way out. He feels drawn to both a newborn's cry and an old man's chortle, as if the start and end of life hold something he wants. Then he finds an arrow in the dirt and wonders whether Time or Cupid shot it, whether age or love has wounded him. The poem ends with a quiet, almost pleading question to his "missing muse." The tone is wistful, tender, and a little bruised.