A man walks through a windy woods, and the ordinary scene slips into something looser and more dreamlike. Moving cloud-shadows make the sun flicker like an old film projector, and the speaker's sense of time wobbles with it: "thirty years ago, or twenty. / It's just last week." The moment feels both new and strangely familiar, as if past and present have blurred.
Then a raven's cry breaks in. The speaker is delighted by it, imagining the bird is flying "for the sheer hell of it," tumbling sideways and upside-down in the wind. When it stays level with him for half a minute, he treats it almost like a companion, or a guide. The closing lines suggest that people steer by whatever reliable thing is nearby, even a bird's chance flight. The mood is quiet, playful and a little wistful: a small moment of connection that gives the speaker something steady in a world of shifting light and memory.