Almost nothing in this untitled poem moves quickly. Eileen "walks slow / in an empty / place," and the speaker, hidden among branches, simply waits and listens. The poem is built around that stillness, and its central idea is a kind of patient attention. The speaker doesn't chase Eileen or explain her. He positions himself "in the corner / of her eyes," at the edge of her vision, and hopes to be noticed there. The final stanza turns that private waiting into a larger hope: a time "when the / world is changed / and we all / dance with these beings / in every direction."
The most striking move is the middle of the poem, where the speaker's hiding place is filled with animals: the rabbit crossing a "shadow line in field frostcover," the marmot "under the stone," the chipmunk poking out "from behind rock." These creatures are glimpsed, not stared at. They live in exactly the peripheral space the speaker claims for himself. By placing himself in the corner of Eileen's eyes, he lines himself up with the animals, and the poem suggests that being seen sideways, briefly, is a form of belonging. Even the raccoon "begging in Yosemite Valley" fits this pattern, though it complicates it. A begging animal is one already used to people, so this is not a perfectly untouched wilderness. The "world" the poem imagines is a shared and slightly messy one.
The language works in a similar way. Many lines drop their articles and verb endings: "rabbit cross shadow line," "chipmunk poke from behind rock." The effect is telegraphic, like quick notes jotted down on a walk. Each animal appears and is gone, and a place name, "summit of Goddard," closes the list like a note on where the sighting happened. The compound "frostcover" packs a whole cold morning into one word. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short and irregular, and capital letters and punctuation are sparse. The rhythm comes from pauses rather than a beat, so the reader is made to slow down to Eileen's pace.
The line breaks do a lot of quiet work. "In an empty / place" lets the word "place" sit alone on its own line, so the emptiness is felt before it is explained. Best of all is "who she is, who / ever she will be," where "whoever" is split in two. The break leaves "who" hanging as a question and then lets "ever" stretch the sentence into the future. Eileen is not pinned down as a fixed person. She is open-ended, still becoming, and the speaker's waiting is partly a way of leaving room for that.
The grammar can be slippery too. "Breathe around her, the / world is off to four directions" reads like an instruction, as if the speaker were telling the world, or us, to breathe. The "four directions" then widen to "every direction" in the last stanza, as if a map were opening out into something less bounded.
The last stanza also reverses the first. At the start, the speaker waits for Eileen. At the end, "she waits, whoever / she will be." The waiting becomes mutual, and the hider is also the one being waited for. The poem never says what kind of relationship this is, and that restraint is part of its charm. It could be love, kinship, or friendship, and the poem doesn't need to choose.
What makes the poem worth reading is its modest, unshowy vision. It does not announce a transformed world. It imagines one from a hiding place, through small animals and a slow walker, and it ends on a hope rather than a promise: a time when people and "these beings" might dance together. The poem asks us to put up with not knowing who someone is yet, to notice what lives at the edges, and to treat waiting as an active, generous way of paying attention.