Most poems about mortality announce themselves with graveyards or falling leaves. "Comment" does something sneakier: it sends you out for a walk on an ordinary winter evening and lets the big thought arrive by itself, in the middle of the errands of the street. The title is a clue to the whole method. The poem never delivers a speech about death; it offers a passing remark, a "comment," and then lets us feel how heavy a small remark can be.
It starts with a set of instructions. "Walk down the avenue. The city avenue. / Let it be winter." The imperative mood is odd and a little theatrical, as if the speaker were a director arranging a scene or a guide leading us by the sleeve. We are not told what happened; we are told to stand here, in this weather, at this hour. The repetition of "avenue" slows us down, and "Dusk sifting slowly / down, hugging the bare street" gives the evening a gentle, almost domestic touch. Dusk sifts like flour, and it hugs. Nothing about the opening is threatening, which is exactly why what follows lands so quietly.
The central move is the personification of night. The "hum of night" is "lurking in the air / as if he were ready to fold his hands over / his stomach and sigh: 'Well, there goes another day!'" It is a wonderfully ordinary image: night as a tired man settling back after supper. The sigh is neither tragic nor cruel; it is the resigned phrase anyone might say. Then the poem makes its pivot with a verb: "His thought drops into your chest." The thought falls like a small stone into water, and the second-person "you" matters here, because the poem refuses to let the reader stay a spectator. The feeling becomes yours before you have agreed to it.
What the speaker does next is the poem's real insight. Instead of grieving, "you" projects forward: "A hundred years from now / the same remark will drop into someone else's heart / with equal dismay." The word "equal" is chilling in a mild way. Human sadness at the passing of days is not unique to us; it is a recurring event, like the weather. The sigh will be inherited, word for word, by strangers.
Then the poem swerves back to the street, and this is where its craft shows. "You notice the bulb is out on Segal's sign. / Joey is wearing glasses. / The skinny girl next door is coming home / from work." These details are flat and specific, and they resist the cosmic thought. A burned-out bulb, a kid's new glasses: the particulars refuse to dissolve into philosophy. "Youth is wearing armor" is the one figurative flash in this passage, and it is a sharp one. The young seem protected, unbothered by the sigh, but armor is something worn against danger, so the line quietly admits that the danger exists. The poem sets the liveliness of the street against the hundred-year view, and neither cancels the other.
The ending delivers the "difference" with a colon and a single capitalized word: "YOU will be gone." After all that gentle, conversational understatement, the shouted pronoun is the poem's only raised voice, and it is brief. Note too that the night "will make the same concession." A concession is something yielded in an argument, and the word suggests a grudging acknowledgment of defeat. Night concedes the day, and in the end the reader must concede themselves.
The poem is free verse, with no regular meter and no rhyme scheme to cushion the thought. Its rhythm is that of speech, short sentences stacked against longer, looser ones, which suits a poem pretending to be only a remark overheard. That plainness is its strength. It makes the idea of one's own mortality feel less like a lecture and more like something you might realize on the way home, between noticing a sign and a neighbor, and then have to carry the rest of the way.