A bird seen for a few seconds becomes the way into a very large question. The speaker spots an owl at the edge of a spruce grove, watches it drop from its roost and glide down a snowy hillside, and then forgets about it until bedtime. As he lies listening to the wind shake the house, the owl comes back, and with it a tentative thought: maybe this is what happiness feels like. The poem never says it is. Its central idea is that happiness may be something we recognise only obliquely, in memory, and with a question mark attached.
The first half is built almost entirely from the eye. The owl is "glimpsed," a word that promises brevity before we have read anything else. Its camouflage is part of the picture: it glides "through trees as brown / as its feathers," so the bird is nearly swallowed by the landscape it crosses. The verbs are exact. The wings are "clipping against / the locust saplings," a sound-and-touch detail that suggests a near collision, though the owl comes through unharmed. It "drops" and then "glides," a small change of gear that you can feel in the rhythm. The gl- sounds of "glimpsed," "glides" and "glare" link the passage together, so that even the harsh "glare / off the snow" belongs to the same movement. Then the gaze lifts to "above, / the deepest blue." The superlative is the only moment of pure intensity in the poem, and it is colour rather than feeling.
That colon after "deepest blue" is the poem's hinge. Everything before it is a single long fragment, a noun phrase with no main verb, like a photograph that hasn't yet been captioned. The colon turns it into a memory: "I think of it again / just as I'm falling asleep." The word "again" suggests the owl has been returning to his mind all day, and "just as I'm falling asleep" places the thought at the edge of consciousness, much as the owl was at the edge of the grove. Present-tense verbs such as "drops" and "glides" make the scene feel replayed rather than recalled, as it might in the half-dream before sleep.
The form is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short and uneven, and many break mid-phrase ("as / it drops," "as brown / as its feathers"), so the reader's eye is tipped forward the way the owl tips down the hill. The two ampersands give the poem a hurried, notebook feel, as if it were jotted down quickly. The second one is the more interesting: "The wind is shaking the house, / & I am wondering." It joins the outer weather to the inner question without any explanation, as though the two belong together. The wind is rough, but the speaker is indoors, in bed, and safe, and the poem lets that contrast do its work without comment.
The ending is plain on purpose. "If this / is what it feels like / to be happy" is made almost entirely of one-syllable words, and the only longer one, "happy," arrives last, where it can't be missed. The phrasing is hesitant ("I am wondering if"), and the demonstrative "this" is deliberately vague. It could mean the memory, the sheltered bed, the wind, or the whole mood. That vagueness is honest. The speaker does not announce a revelation. He is trying out a word to see whether it fits.
This is where the poem earns its significance. We tend to think of happiness as something that announces itself, but here it resembles the owl: half-hidden, brief, easy to miss, and visible mainly because it moves. The speaker catches it only on the second pass, in the quiet after the day, and even then he isn't sure. By pairing a vivid but fleeting scene with a question left open, the poem suggests that attention is what makes such moments available at all. It lets a reader notice how often happiness may be passing through the edge of a day, wings clipping the saplings, before it is gone.