Bonta's subject is small and nearly invisible: a walking stick insect making its slow way through a meadow. The flowers named, goldenrod and asters, suggest a late stage of the growing year, though the poem never says so. Its central idea is that to see a creature built not to be seen, you have to slow down and look from where it is. The poem teaches that kind of attention by making the reader move at the insect's pace.
The form does most of this work. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are tiny, usually one to three words, so the eye has to step down the page the way the insect steps along a stem. The poem's three sentences also behave like the animal. The first creeps through eighteen short lines before it ends. The second, "When it reaches / a gap / in the canopy, / it stops / to sway," halts at the edge of open space. The third, beginning "Then," finally commits, and its lines stretch toward the closing image. The sentences pause, sway and reach, just as the insect does.
The line breaks add small surprises. "The walking" ends the first line, so for a moment "walking" reads as an action, and only the next line, "stick picks," turns it into the insect's name. The creature is introduced already half-disguised as an object, and the soft "k" and "p" sounds in "stick picks" sound like light footfalls. "Stalking" is a pun. A stalk is a plant part, and to stalk is to hunt, so the insect is both vegetation and predator in one word. Judging by the tone, the stalking is gentle, since all it hunts is "just the right / leaf." The phrase "a stem / among stems" is the poem's neatest picture of camouflage, and it shows how well the insect hides by repeating the same word, "stem," on either side of "among."
Then there is the poem's upside-down viewpoint. The insect travels "along the / underside / of the meadow's / flowering surface," so we see the meadow as most people never do, from beneath, as if its blossoms were a ceiling. The word "canopy" adds to the effect. It belongs to forests, and using it for a tangle of wildflowers makes the meadow feel as big as a woodland. Small and large trade places, and the insect's world becomes the whole world.
The ending is the poem's boldest move. The insect's "spined / twig" of a leg reaches for "the nearest / likely toehold," and the body follows, "stretched like / the shadow / of a tree / in winter." The simile compares a living animal to a shadow, which is something that barely exists, and it compares it to the shadow of a bare tree, all thin lines and no leaves. That is a good likeness for a stick insect. But it also brings winter into a meadow of late flowers, which could hint that the season is turning, though that is an inference from the imagery. The last lines flip things once more. The shadow falls "across / the glaring / moment of / the sky," so the dark shape lies on the sky instead of the ground. We are looking up from below, and the insect is a silhouette against brightness. The odd phrase "glaring moment" turns a patch of sky into a flash of time, and the gap in the canopy becomes an instant of exposure, when the hidden creature is briefly visible. The ampersand in "& the rest / of it follows" is a small visual joint, a piece of punctuation that links one part to the next.
The poem matters because it does what good nature writing aims for: it makes the familiar strange without any fuss. There is no speaker saying "I" and no lesson stated. The poet describes carefully, and the reader finds out that looking closely is a kind of moral act, a way of giving a tiny life its full weight. The language is also a kind of camouflage. The insect becomes twig, stem, shadow, and the poem's metaphors hide it and reveal it at once, just as the meadow does.