Dave Bonta's poem begins with a strange, funny image: a gray squirrel eating bindweed seeds and getting high. From there the poem slips into a dreamlike view of the natural world, with morning glory vines winding upward, goldfinches crowded together, and baby spiders floating off on silk threads. The squirrel starts to seem almost human, "like a primate ancestor," and the poem asks what a creature gives up in return for visions.
The answer is memory. The squirrel forgets where it buried its acorns, and those forgotten caches sprout into trees. The poem then turns this into an idea about the mind: you, the reader, become the "gray squirrel mind," and a whole forest can grow from what the unconscious loses or lets go. The mood is playful at first, then wondering and quietly hopeful. The title, "Glory Be," and the last line about the morning "glory"-ing in oaks play on the name of the flower, and they give the ending a feeling of gratitude, as if forgetting were a kind of gift.