The title does the first piece of work. "Teacher, teacher" is the rhythm many people hear in the ovenbird's insistent daytime call, and Dave Bonta turns that mnemonic into a character study. The bird is "didactic by day," drilling its one lesson, but before dawn it sings "another, more evocative melody." Before the schoolmarm appears, the poem has already stated its idea: a person can have a public voice that instructs and a private one that longs for something else, and the second is the one worth hearing.
The woman arrives in the third couplet with the same doubleness. She "had been dreaming of other people's children." The poem never says whether these are her pupils or the children she doesn't have, and the ambiguity is what makes the line ache. She wakes not to inspiration but to "a head full of mucous & a pounding headache." That blunt bodily detail keeps the poem from drifting into pastoral prettiness. Her brother, meanwhile, takes the team to the back field and leaves "the sow to turn the garden with its snout," handing the work of cultivation to an animal. When he smirks that girdling trees "is no work for a man," the line can be read as scorn for a slow, idle method, or as a way of pushing the job, and her, off to the margins. Either way, she picks up the ax.
The imagery of enclosure explains why. Leaves "kept opening in the darkness," growing with no one watching and no one asking, while "the horizon" draws "tight around the cabin" like a closing hand. Her aim, to "win back the sky," is practical, since cutting the canopy lets in light, but it is also a claim to a wider view. The method matters too. Girdling means cutting a ring through the bark so that the tree dies slowly, still standing. There is no triumphant crash, only patience, and the poem trusts that patience to carry its meaning.
The most haunting image follows the rain: a thrush singing "from a branch that had yet to get the news of its death." The tree is already condemned but still leafing and still hosting song, and the personification of "news" suggests the woman has become the one who delivers verdicts. The poem's first teacher was a bird, and by now she is doing the teaching. The line also leaves a shadow of doubt. Who else might be living on, unaware that something has already been decided?
The last couplet turns the violence into dressmaking: "She circled a basswood, / fitting it with a bright new corset." Girdle is both a verb for the cut and a word for a garment, and "corset" pushes the pun into costume. The word belongs to the clothing of a schoolmarm's world, an emblem of being laced in. She fits the tree with the constraint that tightens around her own life, and the tender verb "fitting" makes the act both gentle and merciless. The exposed ring of wood would presumably show pale against the bark, which may be why it is "bright."
Formally, the poem is seven unrhymed couplets in free verse. The long lines run close to the rhythm of speech, and the ampersands lend a quick, handwritten informality. Most sentences end where the lines do, so the poem moves at the steady pace of a chore. "The rain came." is the shortest sentence, and it lands plainly, like weather itself. The final couplet then shrinks, its first line only five words long, and the poem stops on "corset" almost as abruptly as an ax stroke.
What makes the poem significant is how much story it fits into fourteen lines without announcing a moral. The cabin, the team and the word "schoolmarm" suggest a rural past, but the poem avoids nostalgia. It lets a small, stubborn act of labor stand for a whole struggle against expectation and a landscape that crowds in. It also lets the natural world do more than decorate the scene: the birds and the tree answer, mirror and complicate what the woman is doing. Whether she is freeing herself or only wounding what surrounds her, the poem leaves open, and that openness is what keeps it in the mind.