A man sits on his porch with a book of poems in his lap, watching a small bird pick insects from a dead cherry tree. He manages to recall the bird's name, black-and-white warbler, but in doing so loses the name of the poet whose book he is holding. The poem follows that small lapse as it plays out in real time.
The speaker's mood is gentle and a little wry. He fishes for the name by guessing at letters, and he imagines them in odd ways: a G like a smile twisting into a grimace, a T like a gallows. Those images add a faint shadow of mortality, which fits the dead tree and the title's play on "death of the author." For a moment the poet really is orphaned from his own poems.
Then the warbler sings its six whispery notes, and the name arrives in the last line: Bill Knott. The ending feels quiet and a bit comic, a relief that lands as softly as the bird's call.