Nathaniel S. Rounds's poem begins in surreal comedy and ends in something much more tender. The speaker is rescued from hunger by strange "cream of tarter tribesmen," who then steal the speaker's Volvo and smash it through a Laundromat window. The speaker is left wandering among washers and dryers, sipping communal coffee and imagining paintings being bleached. The question "What to do?" sits in the middle like a shrug, a moment of aimless stillness after chaos.
The final stanza turns toward a lost friend, Alfred. The speaker has kept his journal fragments, his bloodstained kerchief, his death poems and wall scribblings. His "mortal whisper" seems to be held in an urn, which suggests he has died and these objects are what remain. His last quoted words, "there's much that remains to be done," land with real weight. The mood is playful and dreamlike at first, then quietly mournful, as if the oddness of the opening were a way of circling grief before facing it.