A friar, out of breath, nearly collides with his guide on a mountain trail, and what the guide shows him is a scene so peaceful it seems to come from scripture. A creek winds through a meadow, sunlight plays on the water, and two animals lie together on the far bank in "vast & reverent stillness." Then the larger one lifts her head, and the picture changes. Her jaws are dripping and her whiskered face is "stained red." The fawn she was "cradling" is her kill. She stands, leaps, and is gone.
The poem's central idea is that beauty and violence share the same space, and that a hopeful viewer will read tenderness into a scene that holds none. The title and the friar's name suggest that Bonta is working with the Spanish search for Cibola, the fabled golden city. The text itself never says so, so that reading is an inference. It fits the imagery well. The fawn glows "a burnished copper," the big cat is "golden," and the pines cast "filigreed shadows," a word borrowed from fine metalwork. The meadow is dressed in the colours of treasure, as if the landscape were teasing a man who is looking for gold. What he finds is a golden creature eating.
The poem also echoes the biblical picture of predator and prey lying down together in peace, a vision the friar would know. The word "reverent" and the verb "cradled" push us toward that comfort. The only evidence against it is the guide's quiet "Mirad," and the poem lets the illusion last a few lines before breaking it. We watch the friar being fooled, and we are nearly fooled ourselves.
The structure carries this effect. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and very short lines, many of only three or four syllables, so the reader moves down the page slowly, as if on tiptoe. Line breaks create small pauses, as in "Then // without turning / his head," where the white space becomes the held breath of two men trying not to be noticed. Ampersands replace "and" throughout, which makes the language look hurried and informal and slightly rough, like something noted down on the move. The sentences run on across line endings, so when the cat finally moves, the syntax speeds up: "she rises // & with one liquid / motion leaps / & vanishes." The motion is fluid, and the poem's rhythm matches it.
Bonta's word choices repeatedly hint at hunting and fishing. The guide "hooks" the friar's habit and tugs him forward "like a trout," which makes the friar a catch and the guide the angler. The meadow lies "within arrow's range," and the cat "intercept[s]" the men's gaze, as if looking were a kind of ambush. Even before the blood appears, the vocabulary suggests that nobody here is simply watching. The sounds change as well. The calm description of water and sunlight is full of soft, flowing sounds, but "dripping jaws & tongue" is clipped and wet and abrupt. The cat's movement is called "liquid," which links her to the creek she lies beside. The danger belongs to the landscape.
Language itself plays a part. The guide speaks Spanish and the poem translates for us: "Mirad. / Look." and "un ciervito, a fawn." The translation gives the speech a hush, and it also reminds us that these men are foreigners reading an unfamiliar land through their own words and assumptions. The friar sees a sacred picture, but the cat is only feeding.
The ending is deliberately unresolved. The cat vanishes without a glance or a sound, and the poem stops with her, giving the friar no reaction and no moral. This leaves the reader with the image. The disappearance recalls a golden place that is glimpsed and then lost, and the poem suggests that wonder and horror may be the same sight seen a moment apart. The scene lasts only a few seconds, but a reader remembers the copper of the fawn and the red on the cat's face, and with them the sense that the most beautiful things in this landscape are also the most dangerous.