Barbara Moraff's poem is a short walk, and it reads like one: stumbling, clipped and a little out of breath. A speaker hikes through snowy woods, slides down to a beaver pond, notices what the beavers have been doing, then turns back and sees the snow beginning to give way. Nothing "happens" in the usual sense. The subject is attention, how a body moving through a landscape takes it in piece by piece, and how quickly that landscape is changing under the walker's feet.
The grammar carries much of the meaning. There is almost no punctuation, and the ampersands and lowercase letters give the language a hurried, notebook-like feel. Sentences never quite finish before the next thing intrudes. Even the compounds feel improvised: "snowfooting" fuses a noun and a verb into a single word for walking in snow, so that the word itself has to be trudged through. The phrase "out of sight / of pines & view of pines" doubles back on itself. The pines vanish and return in the same breath, as they do when you move through a wood and the same trunks keep reappearing at different angles.
The poem's sound is as physical as its movement. Short, flat *a* sounds keep turning up: "ass," "gathered," "grass," "ash," "cat," "axed," "patches." Together they make the middle of the poem sound chopped and gnawed, which suits the subject. The beaver's work is felled trees, and the language is cut into similar stubby pieces. "ass down to beaver / pond" is bluntly bodily. I read it as the speaker sliding or sitting their way down the bank, and the plain, slightly comic word keeps the walker from sounding like a grand Romantic observer. This person is in the snow, getting wet and dirty.
The strangest and most vivid stretch is "gathered puzzle / grass / round / slender ash some / beaver cat axed /". Calling the grass a "puzzle" suggests a tangle of stems the eye can't quite sort out. Then the lines break into single words, "grass" and "round," each given its own beat, as if the speaker pauses to look at each thing in turn. "Cat axed" is hard to pin down. It may be a compressed image of the beaver as a feline, stealthy woodcutter, or it may be a deliberate roughness of language. Either way, the stray slash that follows works like a cut in the text itself. It is one of the few marks of punctuation in the poem, and it falls exactly where the trees have been felled.
After that the poem turns. "hiked out." is the only firm full stop, and it answers the opening word, "hiking." The participle becomes a past tense, and the walk is over almost before the reader realizes it was in progress. On the way back, the line "my heels / at my heels,ground / spruce," doubles the body: the heels seem to follow the speaker like something separate, while the missing space after the comma lets "ground" slide between a verb and a noun. The reader can't be sure whether the speaker is grinding the spruce needles underfoot or simply walking over the ground, and that ambiguity feels true to the confusion of footsteps.
The ending is where the poem becomes more than a catalogue. "patches of quartz / in the fields raising up" shows hard white stone surfacing as the snow retreats, so one white thing replaces another. Then comes "snow going gone / gone gone." "Going gone" blends the process and its result, as "hiking" and "hiked out" did. The repeated "gone" works like an echo fading down a valley, and the poem stops where the snow does. Judging by the imagery, the season is turning, but the poem leaves that unstated and lets the quartz and the thinning snow speak for it.
What makes the poem significant is how little it explains and how much it makes the reader do. There is no rhyme, no steady metre, and no moral tacked on at the end. The rhythm is set by footsteps, pauses and breaths, and the reader walks the same terrain, tripping over the same odd words. The poem is about disappearance, with snow melting, a walk ending and the pines passing out of sight, and it disappears in the same way, with the last words thinning to a repeated echo. It gives the impression that the landscape is made of words that can slip away as easily as snow.