Before anything happens in this poem, someone is simply looking, and admitting how selective looking is. The indigo bunting is "blue & still more blue," yet the speaker asks whether you'd believe that all he could see was the yellow of its bill. The question sets up everything that follows. Attention picks what it wants, and the world is far fuller than any one glance reveals.
The second stanza keeps up that close watching. A hummingbird sits "so still so long" while its head "pivots back & forth the whole time," a small paradox of stillness and constant motion. The elm is a ruin, gnawed by a porcupine all winter, with foliage "like a crazy woman's skirt." Yet the speaker wonders whether it hides two nests. A crow flies "sideways, / silent, against the wind," a detail that seems too odd to have been invented. The damaged tree turns out to be crowded with life, and this idea of life hidden in plain sight drives the rest of the poem.
Then the form changes. The line breaks disappear and the poem becomes two blocks of prose, which suits the shift from watching in one spot to walking out into the field. In the opening stanzas the line breaks cut phrases at hesitant moments ("on / the topmost branch," "with his back / to an indigo bunting"), like an eye settling and moving on. The prose has no such pauses. Discoveries pile up one after another: a bat between the storm windows, cicadas, a turkey leaving her nest, three "naked purple nestlings." The speaker has left chili simmering and a note on the table, so the wild keeps interrupting ordinary domestic life. There is no rhyme or regular meter anywhere. Instead the poem relies on the rhythm of speech and on plain, specific nouns such as myotis, barberry and towhee. The exclamation "Jesus, I thought, what next?" is both comic and close to a prayer, and it is followed immediately by the fawn he almost steps on.
The last paragraph shifts into the present tense: the niece "returns," the fawn "blinks." The encounter feels immediate, as if it is still going on. The fawn is "curled up like a question mark," and the simile fits a poem built on questions. The title seems to nod to Mallarmé's "Afternoon of a Faun," though that is an inference. If so, the mythic creature of that title has become a real, vulnerable animal in a meadow, and the poem's wonder is plainly physical. Notice, too, the speaker's sentence "We are its first two humans… this is the first afternoon of its life." It is tender and a little awed, as though the two of them are witnesses at a beginning.
Eva's response changes the mood. She "explains all about hunters, miming the crouch, the bang," her voice "getting louder & louder," and aims an imaginary rifle "at its heaving ribs." The poem doesn't judge her. She is eight, so impatient for the fawn that she came in sandals, and her game is just what a child knows about deer. But the effect is chilling. The first humans this animal meets are a delighted adult and a child who is already rehearsing its death. The poem ends without commentary, on the fawn's senses: "The wet black nostrils flare & quiver / with the strangeness of our scent." For the first time the perspective flips, and we are the strange, unknown thing in the grass.
The poem is significant for how much it holds without explaining any of it. It moves from the quiet pleasure of birdwatching to something more unsettling, and it never says what to feel. It suggests that paying attention to nature is an act of love, but that we arrive carrying our own history of violence, even in a child's game. The casual ampersands and the diary-like detail keep the tone modest, which makes the final image hit harder.