Dave Bonta's "Chasing shadows" follows a young retriever through six tiny scenes, and in every one the dog is after something that isn't really there. A butterfly's shadow slides over the grass, and the pup pounces, sniffs and digs. In the end he plunges into a creek and finds shadows waiting on the bottom. On the surface it is a funny, affectionate piece of dog-watching. Underneath, it turns a familiar phrase upside down. To "chase shadows" usually means to waste your effort on something unreal. Here the chase is the pleasure, and the last word, "Delicious!", treats the pursuit as a feast rather than a failure.
The form suits the subject. The poem is made of six unrhymed three-line stanzas, close to haiku in feel. The first stanza fits the 5-7-5 pattern exactly ("The retriever pup / chases butterfly shadows / even in his sleep"), but the later ones loosen the count. That looseness reads like a dog slipping a leash. Each stanza is a quick glimpse, a snapshot of one moment, and the poem has no rhyme to tie them together. What links them is a steady progression through the dog's body. The first stanza gives us his sleeping mind, the second his nose, the third his muzzle and legs, the fourth his digging paws, the fifth his open eyes, and the sixth, finally, his mouth. By the end the dog has met the shadow with every sense he has.
The best comedy comes from the gap between the dog's excitement and the shadow's emptiness. In the second stanza his nose "goes wild / at the lack of odor." The phrase "lack of odor" is dry and almost clinical, set against the wildness of the nose, and the joke is that the shadow gives the dog nothing to smell and he keeps going anyway. In the third stanza "his legs get ahead of him," a lovely way of saying that the body has outrun the thinking. The poem then names what he is doing: "herding shadows." A retriever's job is to fetch, so the word is slightly off, and it makes the shadows sound like a flock of small dark sheep that could be gathered in.
The fourth stanza is the funniest and also the most touching. The shadow "shrinks, vanishes," and the dog digs for it. His logic is perfectly sensible if you cannot tell a thing from its absence. Where did it go? Underground, surely. The poem never mocks him for this. It simply reports it, and the plain reporting makes the dog's faith in the world quietly moving.
Then comes the sound of water. The fifth stanza is the only one that leaves out the word "shadow," which has appeared in every other stanza, so the poem seems to hold its breath as the dog goes under. There he "keeps his eyes open," a small detail that shows a creature unwilling to miss anything. The sixth stanza brings the word back, and its middle line, "every pale stone's alive with shadows," is noticeably longer than any other line in the poem, as though the scene has outgrown the little frame. Judging by the imagery, the stones seem to shimmer with the shifting patterns of moving water, so the shadows are everywhere now, and they are alive. The pup has stopped searching for a lost shadow and arrived in a place that is full of them. The shift from "pup" in the first stanza to "golden retriever" in the fifth may also widen the picture slightly, though that is only an inference from the wording.
What makes the poem worth reading is its attention. It asks us to see, as the dog does, that a shadow is a real event on the grass even if it cannot be caught, and that wonder does not need something solid to hold. The word "Delicious!" is the only exclamation in the poem, and it could belong to the dog or to the watching poet, which suggests that the two of them are enjoying the same thing. After five calm, observant stanzas, that burst of feeling is a small, happy surprise. The poem does not explain the joy, and it is better for that.