A speaker walks into a forest carrying silence like a heavy bag, and the walk quickly becomes a way of sitting with grief. The woods are "blue," a word that suggests both the color of distance and the mood of the blues. Jays jeer at the speaker's blue hat, so even the birds seem to mock this lonely figure. The landscape feels high, remote, and cut off.
Then the poem turns strange and almost religious. The speaker is "baptised from below" by groundwater, and the oak seems to speak in tongues. The sounds of the lines echo each other (loud/cloud, hoax/cross-worded, muzzling/puzzle, grief/leaf), as if language itself is tangling up. Grief needs no bait or hook; it simply grabs hold. The ending jumps to the modern world: a face reflected in a dark phone screen, with unknown calls vibrating silently. The mood is isolated and uneasy, a sadness that even the forest can't quite quiet, and the poem suggests the speaker cannot answer or fully escape it.