Leaves fall from a beech, maples glow red, and the title announces "Autumn in April." It reads like a mistake until you look closer. Judging by the imagery, the poem is really about spring, a spring so crowded and disordered that it keeps borrowing the look of other seasons. Beech trees are known for clinging to their dead leaves until new growth pushes them off, and red maples flush red in spring. So the "autumn" may be partly an illusion, though the phrase "unseasonable heat" in the third stanza suggests that something really is off. It is the only openly evaluative phrase in the poem, and it sits there quietly, unexplained.
The central idea is that boundaries blur: between seasons, between indoors and outdoors, between the wild and the domestic. A millipede climbs the bathroom wall "next to the toothbrushes," and the comedy of that detail is also a small invasion. By the end, bears have left "muddy pawprints / on the windows," so the wild has reached the glass of the house. The speaker never comments on any of this. The poem works by placing things side by side and trusting the reader to feel the strangeness.
That method shapes the form. The poem is a chain of eight three-line stanzas, each a self-contained snapshot, recalling the compression of haiku, though the lines don't follow a strict syllable count. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation beyond the occasional comma or colon. The stanzas aren't joined by logic, so the effect is of a notebook kept over a few days, each entry a glance out of a window. Only two moments admit time at all: "When the rain subsides" and "Watched the bears till dark." The second drops its subject entirely, leaving the clipped shorthand of a diary. The reader is placed behind the speaker's eyes without ever being told who is looking.
The word choices are precise and a little unsettling. Hawks "dive-bomb" each other, a military verb for what is probably courtship or territory-fighting. The pregnant cat is "feral" and stares "balefully," a word that turns a hiding animal into a figure of quiet menace, set against the soft spring flowers of the hyacinths. The line break after "hugely pregnant" makes us look at the bulk of the animal before we learn what it is. The vireo's song is "deliberate," a good word for the slow, spaced phrases of that bird, and it is also a rare note of calm after the rain. Even "porcupine-girdled" has a double edge. A girdle sounds like a decoration, but girdling a branch means stripping its bark, so the tree wears a ring of damage.
The poem's best touch is its play with colour. In the fifth stanza the millet "still shows a little yellow" while the goldfinches show "a little green." The two have swapped palettes, since the seed is greening as it sprouts and the birds are presumably leaving their drab winter look behind. Everything is in the middle of becoming something else. Red then runs through the poem like a thread: the maples, the "red-tailed hawks," and finally the "male cardinal." The first stanza says maples are red "again," and the last image returns us to red, so the poem closes a loop even though its stanzas never explain one another.
That last stanza also holds its subject back. We read about the porcupine-chewed branches of the plum tree first, and only in the final line does the cardinal appear, almost like a reward after the damage. Beauty and harm share the same branch. The poem doesn't ask us to choose between admiration and worry.
This is what makes it worth reading. It shows how little a poem needs to say something about a changing natural world: no argument, no lament, only a handful of exact observations and a gap between them. The word "unseasonable" does its small work, the bears leave their prints, and the reader is left to decide how comfortable the crowded, shifting spring really is.