The poem starts with a small confession. "Each time I go out, / I interrupt something": the speaker admits that his presence is never neutral. The two scenes he breaks into are well chosen. A hawk's meal and a groundhog's courtship are death and desire, the two oldest appetites, going on side by side in one ordinary landscape. Because the whole first stanza is a single sentence, the countryside seems crowded with private business, and the person who walks into it is a clumsy gatecrasher.
The second stanza tries to make amends. "Offering" is a word from ritual, and it promises something solemn. What the speaker actually offers is his gray hair, which tells us he is getting older without the poem ever saying so. The line break after "a fine" leaves the word hanging, and "fine" means both delicate and excellent, so the speaker sounds like a shopkeeper praising his goods. The dash that holds back "nesting material" adds a deadpan pause before the punchline. The comedy is gentle, but it is also touching. He tries to be useful on nature's terms, picturing birds lining nests with the thing his own body is shedding. Ageing becomes something he can give away.
The grammar in the third stanza matters here. The sentence that begins in stanza two ("I make an offering…") carries across the white space into "toss the cuttings out," so the gap between stanzas is the moment the hair spends in the air. "Cuttings" is a gardener's word, and cuttings are meant to take root. These ones will not. The word "out" has also changed meaning. It is the title, then the opening line's "go out," and now the thing he does to his hair. By the end it has a third shade, the sense of being left out.
The final image makes the poem's turn: "The warm wind / blows them right back." A warm wind over snow suggests a thaw. Judging by the groundhog's courtship, the poem may be set at the edge of spring, though it never says so. The refusal is not harsh. A cold gust would feel like hostility, but a warm one feels almost playful, and this makes the rejection both funnier and sadder. The last line is made of plain, one-syllable words, and "right back" has the sound of casual speech. The hair returns like a ball thrown against a wall, and the poem stops there without telling us how the speaker feels.
The form supports this lightness. There are three unrhymed tercets in free verse, and each stanza has a short-long-short shape, as in haiku. The syllables are not counted strictly, though. The first stanza's middle line runs longer than a haiku's, and the line "I interrupt something: a hawk's meal" has the clutter of an interruption. Without rhyme, the poem sounds like thinking aloud, and this fits a speaker who is more rueful than solemn. The imagery is simple and mostly visual: gray against white snow, fine strands, moving air. Gray hair on snow would hardly show, so the gift is almost invisible even before the wind takes it back.
The poem matters because it refuses a comforting idea, that nature will welcome the person who loves it. Here the speaker stays an outsider, even a faintly ridiculous one, and he says so without self-pity. His wish to belong is sincere, and the world's polite, breezy indifference is not cruel. It simply does not need him. The poem also quietly links the small and the large. Hawks eat, groundhogs court, hair turns gray, and each belongs to a cycle that goes on whether or not anyone offers it anything. Wanting to give something back and being unable to may be the most honest note a nature poem can strike. The poem says this in nine short lines and ends on a joke that has some ache in it.