Seven short lines, and a whole way of looking at the world is packed into them. A passenger on a bus lifts a camera and grabs a roadside cemetery as it flashes past: statues, autumn leaves, speed. The poem's central idea is that taking a picture feels like possessing something, yet the possessor is rushing past just as fast as the thing possessed. By the end, the speaker catches a glimpse of himself in the shot and moves on.
The opening word, "Ownership," is a blunt, one-word sentence, and everything after it tests the claim. The syntax is stripped to the bone: "I take camera drink it freely / in bus passing highway cemetery." Articles are missing, and so is punctuation, so the line can be read two ways. Either the speaker takes the camera and drinks in the view, or the camera itself does the drinking. Both readings turn scenery into something swallowed. "Freely" adds a quiet irony. The drinking costs nothing, and it is also unrestrained, greedy. What is being consumed, though, is a graveyard, the one place where ownership is supposed to have ended.
The poem has no regular metre and no real rhyme, but there is a faint echo between "freely" and "cemetery." Both lines end on an unstressed "-ee" sound, so appetite and death are linked in the ear before the mind has time to object. The third line, "1 statues of dead with," breaks off on a dangling preposition. The sentence tumbles into the next line the way the bus carries the eye onward. The numeral "1" sits oddly before a plural noun. It might be a slip, or a tally in a photographer's log, but either way it makes the dead countable, items on a list. The fourth line then crams in "fall foliage shot while zooming 80 mph." Numbers instead of words look like a speedometer reading. "Zooming" could describe the bus or the camera lens, and "shot" is both a photograph and a bullet. The dying leaves of fall sit beside the statues, so death is in the colours as well as the stone.
The stanza break marks a turn, and the grammar turns with it. In the first stanza the speaker is the one acting: "I take," "drink." Then comes "My face caught mirroring." Now the face is the one acted upon, and "caught" has a hint of being caught out. Judging by the situation, the speaker's reflection has appeared in the bus window and landed in the frame, laid over the statues and foliage. The verb "mirroring" is left without an object. It never says what the face reflects, and the reader is free to supply the stone figures. The hunter has photographed himself among the dead, and the owner finds he is also an exhibit.
What the speaker does next is the most revealing part. "Advance film to next frame" sounds like a line from an instruction manual, flat and impersonal, as if he is giving himself an order. The moment of recognition is wound past, and the image is not examined. Then comes the last line, a single word: "Fly." It echoes the opening "Ownership." as a bookend, but the two words pull against each other. The first is a noun of holding, the last a verb of leaving. "Fly" can mean the bus racing on, the film leaping to the next picture, a flight from an uncomfortable thought, or the old saying that time flies. The poem leaves all of these open, and none of them involves keeping anything.
What makes the poem worth reading is how closely its form matches its subject. A longer, more reflective poem would have lingered over the cemetery and turned the encounter into a sermon on mortality. This one behaves like the speaker. It glances, snaps, and moves on, so the reader is carried past the same unsettling image without being given time to settle on it. The title is only three asterisks, which suits a poem that refuses to stop and name what it has seen. In a few lines, it asks whether collecting images of things is a way of meeting them, or a way of avoiding them. The face in the glass suggests the speaker may suspect the answer.