The speaker looks back at himself and another boy, Michael and John, playing together in a puddle shimmering with gasoline. The rainbow sheen is pretty and polluted at once, and that mix runs through the whole poem. The boys are poor, dressed in "welfare rags," but they're too young to feel embarrassed. Their protection is thin: a crossing guard for shelter, God in place of a present father.
The poem suggests the boys have different mothers, Mary and Liz, who went hungry while pregnant, eating candy instead of real meals. Yet the boys seem to share a father figure, and the poem names him as Lucifer, linked to the leaded gasoline. That turns the shared puddle into something like a shared inheritance, and the fumes and secondhand smoke become a kind of family legacy.
The mood is bittersweet. It's tender toward the children and bleak about their circumstances, but the last line, "a hunger for words as song," offers a way out: poetry grows from the same hunger the mothers knew.