Some poems tell a story; this one takes a walk. Its stanzas read like things noticed along a woodland path, each stopping the speaker for a moment before the next arrives. The title, with its parenthetical "(6)", suggests one piece in a numbered sequence, but the poem is complete on its own. Its subject is the way a place full of living things is always feeding, sheltering, remembering and clinging, often all at once.
The opening couplet is a small joke with a dark edge: "they must love the milk / that makes them so bad-tasting." Milkweed bugs live on a plant whose sap is bitter, and the speaker guesses at their motives. "Must love" is wonderfully human, as if the bugs had chosen a risky favourite food. The line also turns on the word "milk," which usually suggests nourishment and comfort. Here the same substance is a kind of protective poison, so the poem's first idea is that what feeds you and what makes you unpalatable can be the same thing.
The single-line stanzas are the most interesting structural feature. "milkweed bugs," "memorial bench," and "deertongue grass" work like captions or labels, the poem's way of simply saying a name. Because they sit between larger stanzas, they can be read as a title for what follows or a tag for what came before, and the poem never settles which. "Milkweed bugs" arrives after the joke it explains, while "memorial bench" seems to introduce the next stanza. That looseness makes the poem feel more like a field notebook than a polished argument. The names themselves are also a pleasure to say. "Deertongue" quietly echoes the earlier taste of milk by putting an animal's mouth into the grass.
The memorial bench stanza contains the poem's neatest reversal: "all the young trees / it shelters now." We expect a bench to shelter a person, perhaps the mourner it was built for. Here the bench, presumably left in place while the woods grew back, shelters saplings. The memorial to someone who has died has become a nursery for new life. The poem states no sadness and offers no moral. It lets the word "now" carry the passage of time.
Time lingers in the next image too: "the fog still lingers / in a funnel spider's web." The "still" suggests a morning that is slow to end, and the repeated *l* and *f* sounds in "fog," "still," "lingers" and "funnel" give the line a soft, damp drag. The web has become a container for weather, a funnel filled with cloud. It is a fragile structure built to trap, and it is holding something that cannot be caught.
Then the poem turns slightly sinister. "The 'creep' in 'creeper'" is the only line that talks about language itself, and the quotation marks make us look at the word as if for the first time. A plant name suddenly holds a shiver. The final stanza makes good on that unease: the vine is "battened to a locust trunk / by a thousand tentacles." "Tentacles" is a sea-creature word, and "battened" is a nautical one, as in battening down the hatches. After the fog, the funnel and the bench, the forest begins to feel like a seabed. "Batten" also has a second meaning, to thrive by feeding greedily on something else, which links the vine back to the hungry bugs of the first stanza. The trunk is held, fed upon and perhaps protected all at once, which is the same mixture of care and appetite the poem began with.
There is no rhyme here, and the rhythm follows the pace of looking rather than any regular beat. Stanzas are short, then the last one stretches to three lines and ends on the hard, clustered *t* sounds of "battened," "locust" and "tentacles," like something gripping tight.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It never explains that nature is both tender and predatory, that memorials get overgrown, or that every bit of shelter has a hunger inside it. It offers a bug, a bench, a web and a vine, trusting the reader to feel what links them.