Orrin Schwab imagines a strange event: the sky opens and drops thousands of tons of old things onto the streets, including cans, leaflets, videotapes, old songs, photographs of the dead, antique toys. What stands out is how ordinary the response is. Nobody panics or mourns. People in sleek sports cars slow down to look, then neatly fold coats and stack song books and baseball cards into their trunks, as if tidying up were the only sensible reaction.
The speaker never says what he feels, and that flat, reporting tone is the point. The poem seems to suggest that a modern, polished world handles the past by storing it away, not by facing it. The drivers are "slim, clear skinned" and hidden behind dark glasses, which makes them seem distant and unreachable. By the end the streets are clean, the sky is cloudless, and the sun is "distant." The mood is cool, calm, and a little eerie, a quiet picture of memory being packed up and forgotten.