A wounded buck lies down in the laurel, and a dozen chipmunks start calling over the spot "in unison – mallets on a xylophone / all striking the same, middle bar." The image is funny and exact, and it sets up the poem's quarrel. The chipmunks are moderation made audible: one note, no range, repeated by everyone. The stanza ends by twisting the old proverb about a little learning being dangerous: "Too much moderation seems a dangerous thing." The speaker says it deadpan, as if reporting a finding.
The next stanza states the thesis flatly: "We are only ever saved by what exceeds us." What follows suggests the loss is not only of animals but of whole kinds of thinking. When old fields become subdivisions, "the kinds of thoughts that need an unbroken span of sky / vanish along with the hiccup of the Henslow's sparrow." The verb "hazarded" in "a few house lots hazarded in the forest" makes each small, reasonable step sound like a bet. The wolves then "begin to forget how to lope," a gentle verb for something terrible. The line "halt in the middle of a howl –" breaks off at a dash, so the form acts out the interruption. The word "middle" has now returned, this time as the place where something is cut short.
After the stanza break, a freight train wails through the gap "two hundred years later," a mechanical stand-in for the howl. "All it lacks is the shiver," the speaker says, and then slyly adopts the voice of reason: "It hardly seems reasonable to demand the return / of thousands of acres of wildness / just for that." The short lines and the phrase "just for that" mock the logic of compromise. By the time the sentence ends, the reasonable position sounds absurd.
At the crossing, the speakers sit "engine idling," waiting, running on fuel and complicit. A boxcar carries "neat black letters" that spell "an immoderate & wholly inarguable projection: / NATURE WILL WIN." The neatness of the lettering contrasts with the wildness of the claim. The poem lets the sentence stand in capitals, then gives only "the flashing orange light receding into the distance."
That orange light has an afterlife in the final stanza, which turns to prayer. The poem asks us to "pray for the physicians / who cannot heal themselves" and for a shaman who removes poison "everywhere he presses his mouth." On the loading dock behind the hospital, "the same cherry has been burning / at the end of one cigarette or another for hours." The smokers presumably work in the hospital, though the poem never says so. Their language is clinical and ritual: they "huddle," "confer over some desperate case," lean close with "pursed lips." But the shaman sucks poison out, and they suck smoke in. The final image, "a spark from the middle / of a column of ash," brings back the middle one last time. The center is no longer a safe, dull note but the one place where something still glows.
The ending is deliberately unsettled. Excess here is a habit that harms, yet it is also appetite, fire, and a refusal to be tidy. If nature will win, that includes the bodies of the people trying to heal others. The poem does not say whether this is a rescue or a defeat, and the ambiguity keeps it from turning into a sermon.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, and it shifts between long, unspooling sentences and clipped, wry ones. The ampersands and dashes give it a casual, spoken look. The title promises a triptych, and the page falls into five stanzas. I read the three panels as the woods, the railway crossing, and the loading dock, with the first two stanzas setting up the argument and the last three carrying it out.
The poem is significant because it argues for wildness without pleading. It uses understatement, a few precise birds and animals, and one recurring word to show how a reasonable life can shrink the mind. It ends on a spark, small enough to be missed and stubborn enough to matter.