On Thanksgiving, the day devoted to full plates, Dave Bonta watches a hungry animal go without. A fisher (a dark, long-bodied relative of the weasel, despite its name) circles a dead oak at dusk, hunting mice, and the hunt fails. The speaker, watching from across a frozen pond, walks away "fuller than before." The poem's central idea lives in that mismatch. The creature that leaves empty-handed has given the human something richer than a meal, and the gratitude the speaker feels is for wildness itself, not for abundance.
The poem is built from eleven short couplets with no rhyme, no punctuation, and not a single capital letter, not even for the pronoun "i." That lowercase "i" is a quiet joke at the speaker's own expense. The observer makes himself small so the animal can fill the frame. The unpunctuated flow gives the poem the hush of someone watching and trying not to be noticed, and the enjambments work like held breaths. "It is only i sitting across / the frozen pond" breaks at "across," so the line itself leaves a gap before the pond arrives, enacting the distance it describes.
The first half is all careful seeing. The fisher "dances," a surprisingly gentle verb for a predator, and then becomes "a dark sine curve / against the snow." The mathematical image is precise and a little unexpected. A sine curve is a smooth, rolling wave, which captures the animal's supple body. The poem then complicates it by saying the curve is "somehow able / to freeze for long minutes." A wave that stops mid-motion is a good picture of a hunter's stillness, and it shows the speaker's honest bafflement ("somehow") at how an animal can pull off such control. Then comes "crouching pouncing," two participles jammed together without a comma, so the action happens faster than the punctuation could keep up. The next phrase, "coming up empty," deflates the sentence in soft, slow sounds.
The turn arrives with "it is only i." The word "only" can be read two ways: the speaker may be insisting that he alone profits from the scene, or confessing that he is a mere bystander. The wry hedge "i suppose" and the phrase "seasonally / appropriate gratitude" suggest he knows how neatly his feeling fits the holiday, and he half-distrusts it. Yet the poem refuses to stay ironic. The last four couplets begin with "for," like a grace said before a meal, and the list moves from the animal ("this beautiful small beast / with its wild blood-lust") to the rarity of the meeting ("once in a new moon") to the final thanks. The phrase "once in a new moon" twists the familiar "once in a blue moon" into something darker. A new moon is no moon at all, which suits a sighting at nightfall and a creature that lives half-hidden.
Sound ties the poem together quietly. An f-sound runs through it: "fisher," "freeze," "frozen," "fuller," "filled," "freedom." The words seem to pass from the animal's stillness to the speaker's fullness, ending in freedom. The pairing "beautiful small beast" and "blood-lust" holds tenderness and violence side by side without choosing between them. The speaker does not soften the fisher into something cute. Its wildness, the very thing that makes it dangerous to mice, is what he is thankful for.
The final couplet is the most daring: "for the freedom it still enjoys / to disappear." The word "still" hints at a worry that such freedom cannot be taken for granted, though the poem never says why. The last word, "disappear," is what the poem itself does, ending on an absence just as the animal slips out of view. Most thanksgiving poems give thanks for what we have received. This one gives thanks for a creature that can't be held, owned or fully seen. Its significance is in that reversal, a feast made of attention, and in how much it achieves with so few words and so little decoration.