The title is a word most readers won't know, and it does quiet work. Epizoochory is the spreading of seeds by animals, burrs hooking into fur or feathers and riding along until they drop. The word never appears in the lines themselves, but one image acts as its definition: the lost dog with "enchanter's nightshade burs / in its ears." With that in mind, the whole poem rereads itself as a walk where everything catches on something else. A spiderweb clings to the speaker's glasses, seeds cling to the dog, and the speaker's attention clings to one small thing after another. Being carried by the landscape, and carrying it in turn, is the poem's central idea.
The form suits that idea. Bonta gives us a string of short fragments, mostly three lines and sometimes two, with no rhyme, no regular metre, no capital letters and no punctuation. Each unit is only a few stresses long, and the white space between them works like the pauses in a walk, where you stop, look, and move on. The missing punctuation also makes the reader decide where each image breaks. "spiderweb / on my glasses / name that tune" can be read as two separate observations, or as a single thought: the web blurs the view, and the speaker is left guessing, as in a game where you identify a song from a few notes. Either way, the forest becomes something to be half-recognised rather than fully read.
Many of the units rest on a sharp juxtaposition. "snarl / of a bobcat / traffic whine" is built so that the two sounds lean against each other. The reader can't tell whether the wild noise and the road noise alternate, or whether one is mistaken for the other, and the line breaks leave that open. "children's cries / the holiday sky empty / but for a vulture" pairs innocent noise with a scavenger, and the unease is never explained. In "waterfall that only sings / when the stream's a trickle," a small paradox does the work. The waterfall is musical only when it is nearly silent, so quiet turns out to be a condition of hearing.
The images are exact and often odd. "white spears / of black cohosh" crosses its colours inside the name of a single plant, and "an insomniac firefly" gives the insect a human restlessness, as if it were wandering among the blossoms because it can't sleep. "A wood pewee's beak / snapping on a moth" is all consonants, and the hard clipped sounds mimic the strike. "Tick-trefoil reversing / in mid-air" is harder to pin down. Judging by the name, it is another plant that travels on animals, but the poem gives us only a puzzling motion and trusts the reader to sit with it. The line about oaks is bolder: "gnarled oaks / the sky never runs out / of lightning." The twisted trunks suggest past storms, and the exaggeration in "never runs out" makes the sky feel generous and threatening at once.
Danger and tenderness sit side by side throughout. Deer bed down on an old quarry road, which suggests human work has been left behind and taken over. Fresh bear markings appear on a power pole, so the wild leaves its signature on the infrastructure. These are two-line units, and their brevity makes them feel like things glimpsed rather than studied. Nature and human traces keep brushing against each other, much as the burs brush the dog.
The ending is the most surprising move. After all that clipped, objective noticing, the last unit says outright what it feels: "waist-high ferns / dancing in the wind / such release." "Release" is the first abstract, emotional word in the poem, and it has a double meaning. It describes the ferns, and the speaker's own loosening of tension, but it also names the second half of epizoochory, when the seed finally lets go. To be snagged is only half the story, and the poem ends on the letting go.
What makes the piece worth reading is how it teaches attention without lecturing. It never tells us to value the natural world. It shows a speaker so open to it that a web, a burr, a whine of traffic or a moth in a bird's beak all leave a mark. The reader finishes the poem a little tangled up in it, which is the point.