Nobody in Dave Bonta's "Guise" can be sure what they are hearing or seeing, and the poem makes that uncertainty its subject. Over three short stanzas it moves from a puzzled listener to a watching hunter to a speculation about a weasel. In each, a signal arrives, and in each there is a doubt about what is really behind it.
The first stanza is made entirely of questions. "That gobbling on the ridge: / turkey, or turkey hunter?" works because hunters really do imitate the birds they stalk, so the sound is both real and possibly fake. The second question, "That whistle: factory or train?", takes the problem into the human world. Both candidates are manufactured, and still the ear cannot decide. Neither question is answered. The poem moves on and leaves the reader without the comfort of knowing, which is exactly the speaker's position.
In the second stanza the speaker moves from ear to eye and becomes a tracker. "I follow a vole's progress / by watching where the grass trembles." The vole is never seen, only inferred from the movement it causes. The poem gives tracking in miniature: reading small disturbances as signs of a hidden life. Then comes the interruption, "until a breeze springs up," and the dash before "until" works like the breeze itself, cutting the line off. Once the whole field is moving, the single trembling is lost. The wind is a kind of camouflage the vole never had to ask for.
The last stanza turns this into a thought experiment. "How the weasel must hate the wind!" The speaker has just lost the vole's trail, and the weasel, a real hunter, must feel the same frustration, only more sharply. By implication the speaker has joined the predators, a watcher in the grass like the weasel. Then the poem adds its best twist: the weasel must "strive to sound / exactly like" the wind. The wind is the weasel's enemy because it hides the prey, but it is also a model to copy, since a hunter that sounded like wind could move unnoticed. The pronoun "it" in the final line is mildly ambiguous, and that suits a poem about things passing for other things. The word "must," used twice, reminds us that the speaker is imagining the weasel's feelings, not reporting them. The poem's confidence is an invention, and it knows it.
The form is quiet and loose. There is no rhyme and no regular metre; the lines are short and the syntax is close to speech. Even so, the sound is carefully handled. "Gobbling" imitates the noise it names. The w-sounds run through "whistle," "watching," "where," and then gather in "weasel" and "wind," so the two words nearly echo each other on the page. That echo reproduces the weasel's ambition: the animal wants to sound like the wind, and the language lets one word sound like the other. The last line, "exactly like it," is the shortest in the poem, and "exactly" is nicely ironic, since perfect imitation is the one thing the poem has taught us to doubt.
The title explains the pattern. A guise is an outward appearance, often a false one. The turkey hunter takes the guise of a turkey, the factory whistle may pass for a train, the breeze covers the vole, and the weasel wants to pass for the breeze. Even the speaker is partly disguised as a mere observer, when he is in effect hunting too.
The poem's significance lies in how much it holds in so little space. It treats the natural world as a place of signs that can be read but never fully trusted, and it makes us feel how close all perception is to guesswork. It does this lightly, with humour in the weasel's resentment and wonder in the vole's hidden journey, and without lecturing. A reader who finishes it will probably listen to the next unidentified noise a little differently, and that is a lot to ask of nine short lines.