A speaker on a bus races past a highway cemetery and snaps pictures of it, treating the view as something to grab and use up. The opening word, "Ownership," sets the tone: taking a photograph feels like possessing the scene, and the speaker "drinks" it greedily. But what gets possessed is strange. Statues of the dead and bright autumn leaves are squeezed into one quick shot, taken while moving at 80 mph.
The poem's choppy, broken phrasing mimics that speed. Nothing is given time to settle. Then, briefly, the speaker catches their own face reflected, perhaps in the bus window, and the mood shifts. The collector of images becomes an image too. Death and fall hang in the scenery, yet the speaker simply advances the film and says "Fly." The feeling is a restless, slightly numb detachment, as if the camera lets the speaker look at mortality without having to stop and face it.