Nobody in Dave Bonta's poem is quite seen for what they are. A man slaps at his own arms and a bird takes him for a lunatic. A woman shuts her eyes and the police take her for a worshipper. A famous coach hands out gifts and his admirers take him for a saint. The poem is a short lesson in how much of what we "see" is really a story we tell ourselves, and in how dangerous that habit becomes when the stakes rise.
The structure does most of the teaching. Sixteen lines fall into eight couplets, with no rhyme and no fixed meter, so the voice sounds like someone thinking aloud on a walk. Nearly every sentence begins with "To": "To the thrush," "To the cops," "To friends & admirers," "To us." Each opening names a viewpoint before it names a fact, and the verbs that follow hedge and guess: "it must look," "it might appear," "it must've seemed." Nothing is certain here except that someone is looking and someone is interpreting.
The three human examples escalate. The first is almost comic. The speaker's explanation, "but that's only incidental. / I'm swatting mosquitoes," is flat and slightly deadpan, as though a misreading this silly hardly deserves correcting. The second is more delicate. The woman closing her eyes "to see the afterimages on her eyelids" is doing something private and odd, and the poem lets a police officer's suspicion hover over it. Afterimages are what lingers once the bright thing has gone, which suggests she has been staring at something dazzling. That may quietly prepare the ground for the final example, though that is an inference rather than anything the poem says.
The third example changes the temperature. "Legendary," "so generous," "all the things he gave those boys, / all the places he took them": the admirers' language is warm and a little breathless. But "those boys" is an unsettling phrase, and "took them" is a verb that can carry menace as easily as kindness. The poem never says what the coach did, and it doesn't need to. Judging by the wording, the reader is meant to sense a gap between the admirers' version and the truth. The past-tense "must've seemed" adds to the effect. It sounds like the speaker looking back after the picture has changed. The first two examples show people seeing something strange where nothing is wrong. The third shows people seeing generosity where something is badly wrong, and the same structure of "to them it looked like..." now has real consequences.
That is why the title, "What to Call It," matters. Naming is the problem the whole poem circles. A wrong name for a man swatting mosquitoes costs nothing, but a flattering name for a powerful man's conduct can shield it. By refusing to name the coach's actions, the poem makes us feel how easily vague, pleasant words ("gave," "took," "generous") can cover over what they describe.
Then comes the turn back to the bird. The opening thrush was an audience, and the closing one is the subject. "To us it's a mournful song," the speaker admits, including himself and us in the habit of projecting feeling onto the world. The question "but to the wood thrush itself?" is left open, and the answer is hedged with "Perhaps": "just the sound of dusk / passing through its windpipe." The image is wonderfully physical. The bird becomes a kind of instrument, the evening itself the thing being played, and "windpipe" strips away any romance. The song is breath and air, not grief.
This ending cuts two ways. It humbles us, because the thrush is not sad and our reading says more about us than about the bird. But it also leaves a worry behind. If we cannot know what a bird's song means, how much more careful should we be about judging the people around us, especially when we have reasons to want them to be good? The poem's quiet achievement is to move from a joke about mosquitoes to a moral question without ever raising its voice.