Pressing your ear to a tree and hearing only the weather is a small failure, and Dave Bonta builds a whole poem out of it. In nine short lines, a walker on a windy ridge tries to listen to an oak and gets nothing. The wind then wipes out the evidence that the walker was ever there, and a woodpecker turns up doing what the human could not. The central idea is quiet but sharp. The living world carries on conversations that people can approach but not join, and our presence in it is lighter and more temporary than we like to think.
The first stanza sets the scene in flat, plain language. "High winds." is a fragment, a weather report, and it is repeated at the stanza's close, where the speaker hears "nothing but wind." The stanza is boxed in by the very thing that spoils the experiment. The gesture itself is touching: an ear against a trunk is how we listen to a chest for a heartbeat, so the speaker treats the oak as something with an inner life. The oak stands on a ridge-top, exposed and enduring, which makes it seem a worthy thing to question. "Nothing but" also hides a small joke. Wind is hardly nothing, since it is the loudest presence on the ridge, but it is not the answer the speaker wanted.
The second stanza turns from sound to sight, and its logic is surprising. We expect snow to fill in footprints, but these are "more than erased; / they're raised up, scattered like ashes." The wind does not smooth the tracks away. It lifts the snow out of them and flings it about, so the hollows the speaker made are literally raised. The simile is the poem's darkest moment, because ashes bring in funerals and the idea that a person's trace is the remains of something finished. "Raised up" may also carry a faint echo of resurrection, though that is an inference, and the sense is one of dispersal rather than rebirth. The title helps here: a line of footprints is a line the walker has made, and the wind treats it as carelessly as it would a line of writing.
Formally, the poem is three tercets in free verse with no rhyme scheme and uneven line lengths. Sound still holds it together. "Ear" and "hear" chime in the first stanza, and "erased" and "raised" nearly rhyme in the second, one word undoing the other. The vocabulary is almost entirely short, everyday words. The only descriptive touches are "high" and "ridge-top," and the restraint makes the single simile stand out. The sentences are brief, and the punctuation (full stops, a semicolon) lets each stanza close down like a door.
The third stanza changes the poem's direction with a small word: "must." The speaker cannot know what the woodpecker hears and can only guess, but the guess is generous. "Any sound / an oak can make" quietly admits that the oak makes many sounds, more than the wind-filled nothing the speaker managed to catch. The woodpecker is placed at exactly the spot where the speaker stood, against the same trunk, with its beak where the ear was. The final line, "It taps out a response," is full of plosive consonants, so the words nearly tap themselves. "Response" is the key word. It implies a dialogue, though the poem never says what the oak said. The speaker's verbs ("press," "hear") end in failure, while the bird's single verb succeeds.
Judging by the title, "Walking the line" may point to the boundary between the human and the non-human. It also suggests the ridge line, the line of tracks, the line of verse, and perhaps even a telegraph line along which taps are sent and answered. The poem's significance lies in refusing the comfortable nature-poem scene in which the tree speaks to the poet. It is honest about the limits of listening, and that honesty becomes a form of respect. It is not bleak, though. The exchange between bird and tree goes on without us, and the poem ends by reporting it, as if writing it down were the speaker's own way of tapping back.