The title looks like a coinage, and it works like a small instruction manual. It joins the Greek-derived "ornitho-" (bird) to "-graphy" (writing), so "ornithography" means something like bird-writing. In four short lines, Dave Bonta tests that idea. Birds, trees and books turn out to share a vocabulary, and the poem suggests that writing begins when we notice something in the natural world and let it leave a mark.
The first couplet reads like a definition or a riddle: "a bird is the beginning / of many leaves." The sentence is calm and certain, but its logic is slippery. "Leaves" can be the foliage of a tree, and it can also be the pages of a book, which are traditionally called leaves. A bird can plausibly start both. Birds carry seeds, and a feather, once cut into a quill, is a writing tool. Neither connection is spelled out, which is the poem's strength. We are handed the claim and left to find the route ourselves. The word "many" matters too. One bird becomes a multitude of leaves, as one wing might become a whole book.
The second couplet moves from statement to scene, and its grammar is deliberately loose. "getting a book with blank paper / I saw a wing sunk in a field." Strictly, the opening phrase has no clear subject. It could describe the speaker, but it also seems to hang over the whole moment, as if getting the book and seeing the wing were one event. The two images then overlap. A field is a stretch of ground, but a blank page is a field as well, a flat expanse waiting to be marked. The wing "sunk" in it could be a real bird, fallen or half-buried in grass. It could also be the pale shape of a page, or the trace a pen leaves. The poem does not choose between these readings. The speaker looks at emptiness and finds a wing in it, so the blank paper has already begun to fill. There may be an old echo here too. The word "verse" comes from a Latin word for turning, as a plough turns at the end of a furrow, so writing across a field has long been pictured as ploughing.
The verb "sunk" gives the ending its weight. A wing is meant to lift, and this one is heavy and settled, and perhaps dead. Judging by the imagery, the poem seems to say that the creature has to stop flying before it can become writing. The bird gives up the air and becomes ground, page and mark.
Formally the poem is as spare as the blank paper it describes. It has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so nothing marks a sentence's start or end, and the lines drift like thoughts. The rhythm is easy and conversational in "getting a book with blank paper," then slows sharply at the end. In "I saw a wing sunk in a field," the stresses cluster on "wing sunk," and the reader has to pause there, as if the wing itself were holding the line down. The sounds do quiet work as well. The hard b of "bird," "beginning," "book" and "blank" threads the two couplets together. "Blank" and "sunk" share a clipped nasal ending, an almost-rhyme that links the empty page to the fallen wing. The long vowels and soft l's of "leaves" and "field" give the poem its gentler, more open sound.
The poem is significant because it enacts what it describes. It is itself a few lines in a lot of white space, a small leaf from a larger field, and it asks the reader to treat blankness as fertile rather than empty. It also removes the usual boundary between nature and culture. The bird does not inspire the writing from outside, because the bird is already the first page. Even the speaker's act of looking, signalled by "I saw," seems to be the true beginning of writing. A good deal of meaning is packed into a poem that can be read in seconds.