"man, was it you / who lurked by the barn": the poem starts mid-conversation, as if the speaker has grabbed someone by the sleeve. There is no capital letter and no question mark, so the question never quite closes. It just runs on through the whole poem as one unpunctuated breath. We never learn who "you" is. Judging by the text, it is not the hunter, who is tucked away in his blind at the end. "You" seems to be a second onlooker, someone who was nearby and watched, or didn't, while a bird died. That makes the poem less a story about a hunter than a question about bystanders, and the reader is invited to stand among them.
The scene begins with a deliberately soft detail. The speaker "whiffed / the early morning / spring tulips." The verb is small and a little comic, a quick sniff rather than a solemn inhalation. Spring, morning and flowers are all words of beginnings. The poem sets them up so the next image can cut across them: "the black gander" falling "through / air."
The line breaks do much of the work here. Kaye gives "air" a line to itself, then "& dive," then "down" alone, so the eye drops down the page just as the bird drops through the sky. The lines are short, often only one or two words, and the effect is staccato. A longer line would have let the fall feel smooth. These fragments feel like what an eyewitness takes in, a series of flashes with no time to arrange them into tidy syntax. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The only music comes from the pacing, and from the sounds of the words themselves: the hush of "spring tulips" gives way to the hard, clipped "clutch" and "cursed."
The most disturbing moment is the gander's last action. After the shot, the bird "dive[s] / down / into the water / & clutch[es] / the weeds / at the bottom / & stay[s] there / drowning." It is hard to read this as simple falling. The verbs suggest a bird that is acting, perhaps hiding, perhaps holding on to the only thing within reach. The irony is that a water bird is dying in its own element, and the ordinary place of safety has become the place of death. The participle "drowning" is left to hang at the end of its line, a present-tense action that doesn't finish, so the death feels slow rather than sudden. The speaker, and we, are made to watch it last.
Then the last two lines swing the camera to the hunter, who "cursed & sweated / in his blind." The word "cursed" is petty beside what has just happened, since he seems annoyed at losing his prize, not moved by the loss of the bird. "Sweated" gives him a body that is hot, anxious and effortful, in contrast with the cool underwater stillness of the gander. And "blind" is a nicely double word. It is the screen hunters hide behind, but it also hints, as an inference rather than a stated point, at someone who cannot or will not see what he has done. The speaker, by contrast, sees everything, including the black bird against the bright morning.
The poem never states an opinion. It doesn't call the hunt cruel or the onlooker guilty. It sets a pleasant morning beside a long, unwatchable death and leaves the connection to us. That restraint is what makes it effective. The opening question, "was it you," pulls the reader in, because if the person who lurked by the barn is anyone at all, it might be us. Few poems this short manage to make the act of watching feel like a moral choice, but this one does. Its closing image of a man hidden and sweating, while a bird holds the weeds beneath the water, stays in the mind long after the tulips are forgotten.