A big, muscular man who rolls cigars enters the scene, and begins whipping up ice cream in a kitchen. The ice cream curds evoke desire, and there are girls hanging around in the kitchen with boys who carry flowers in old newspaper. Bare reality should take precedence over any fuss about appearances: the poem urges us to let the young people live in the moment.
The second stanza switches scene to a quieter room, perhaps a bedroom. An embroidered sheet is taken from an old dresser to cover the dead body of a woman, but it is not long enough, and leaves her knobby feet exposed. The woman is cold and motionless under the light. The poem ends by re-asserting the supremacy of ice cream and the pure, present reality it represents.
