The poet is looking at the sea when a man blocks her view. It is "human nature to stand in the middle of things," but it is impossible to stand in the middle of the sea. Unlike the stately line of quiet firs she sees, the sea is “a collector,” and will return one’s greedy look. Men who once had that look are now just bones, but others still blithely lower their nets and row away, not knowing that they are “desecrating a grave.”
The poet observes the wrinkles on the foam of the waves, the undulation of the water, and the gulls and tortoises. She concludes by saying that the ocean flows on as if it were not a place in which dropped things sank or twisted and turned without “volition [or] consequence.”
