Three short scenes sketch a speaker caught between the natural world and the world of school. In the first, he says he grew up with a woodstove rather than a television, so what he absorbed was the language of the forest. "The theme songs of oak" is a playful phrase: he treats trees as if they were familiar shows he knows by heart, and the pride in it feels warm and a little wry.
The second stanza turns wistful. He imagines unlearning the names of birds, as though naming them clips their wings. Knowledge, the poem suggests, can come between us and what we see, and he longs to watch a bird simply fly.
The last image is a dream of running through a half-remembered high school to catch a bus. It reads as anxious and unfinished, a sense of being late or out of place. Together, the scenes create a quiet, reflective mood with a trace of unease: he is at home in the woods, yet unsure of the other places that shaped him.