A walker leaves the path and moves through the woods with careful attention, noticing small things: spiderwebs strung across the way, a loop of grapevine, a patch of horsebalm that smells of lemons. The poem is built from short, separate glimpses, the way a mind works when it is really looking rather than thinking about something else.
The most human moment comes in the middle. The speaker "pishes," making the soft sound birdwatchers use to coax small birds into view, and admits it is only "as if fluent / in bird mysteries." There's gentle humor and humility there: the speaker is a visitor trying to speak a language they only half know. The warbler gets a line to itself, as if it appeared and vanished just as quickly.
Later images hint at separation, with the offspring "on the other side of the deer fence," and then the poem ends on a single line, "the big pine." The mood is quiet, curious, and a little wistful, with the unfinished ending leaving us standing in the stillness.