The first stanza knows everything. The mother bear leads her cubs to the edge of the woods, stops at the sound of a screen door, and smells trouble. Then the second stanza takes the knowledge away. The speaker admits his nose picks up "nothing of her musk," and his eyes are no use in the dark. The opening, it turns out, is imagination: the speaker reconstructing what the bear's senses must be telling her about him. He is the "trouble." The poem's central idea is this lopsided encounter, in which a creature perceives a human perfectly while the human can barely perceive her back.
The speaker's self-description is wry and a little humbling. His nose is "grossly unequal" to hers, and his "primate eyes" are "made for the colors of day, not shades / of darkness." Calling himself a primate puts him in the animal world, but as a poorly equipped member of it. Language makes up for what the senses can't supply. He cannot smell "the sweet milk oozing / from well-bit nipples," yet he writes it with tactile, almost tender precision. The darkness is "each clot of night," which makes it thick and nearly bodily, something he has to peer into rather than see through.
When sight and smell fail, hearing is what remains. "The space between us fills / with explosions of breath," and the poem turns loud. "HUH. HUH." and "TOCK / TOCK / TOCK" are printed in capitals, so the page itself seems to get louder. The line breaks drop the clacking of teeth into separate beats, like footsteps or a pulse. The speaker works out her size from the noise: "the dangerous size of her / in that hollow TOCK." The clacking sounds like a warning, though the poem never says so. The bear is never seen, and she is still the most vivid presence in the poem.
The form suits this restraint. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, just conversational free verse with ampersands that keep it casual. The breaks often act out the action. "I peer / into every shadow" interrupts itself mid-look, and "leads her cubs down to / the edge of the woods" hangs on a small preposition as the animals hesitate. The stanzas shrink as the tension peaks, ending in short, flat statements.
Then comes a deflating fourth stanza. The speaker leans over the porch rail, "naked from the waist up," bare-skinned and exposed. A mosquito whines in his ear, a tiny, ordinary predator beside the large one in the dark. The fireflies "as usual, / illuminate nothing." The line is funny, but it also mocks the human wish for light that would let him see. Natural glow is on show and no use for knowing anything.
The ending moves to morning, when his daytime eyes work again. What they find is an aftermath: "every rock on the hillside / has been moved from its bed." Presumably the bear has been searching for food, though the poem leaves that as an inference. "Bed" is a gentle, domestic word for something so forcefully disturbed. "Every" gives the scale of her strength, and it confirms the "dangerous size" he could only hear the night before. The speaker adds no comment or moral. The poem simply stops, as he is left with evidence and no explanation.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It would have been easy to write something sentimental about a mother bear and her cubs, or a thrilling account of danger. Instead the poem reverses the usual direction of looking. The human is the one being smelled, heard and judged, and the title, "The mother," reminds us that her alertness is protective, so that he registers as a threat to her young. The poem offers a small, honest lesson in humility. Nature here is not a view to admire from the porch. It has its own senses and purposes, and it leaves behind overturned stones.