The first thing the snow does in this poem is break a rule of size. Its flakes are "enormous," each one "bigger / than the invisible moon." The comparison sounds absurd until you remember how perspective works: a flake near the eye can blot out something vast and far away. Mary F. C. Pratt opens "Fugitive Landscape" with this everyday trick of perception, and the rest of the poem turns the trick into an argument.
The middle of the poem builds a scene and then bends it. "In twenty-seven rectangles, four trees / climb a blue hill; beyond, / the mountains rise green." The rectangles are never explained. Judging by the word, they could be window panes, frames, or a grid of images, and the poem leaves that open. A single view has been cut into twenty-seven pieces, yet the trees stay four. The verbs keep the picture moving along one vertical line: snow falls, trees climb, mountains rise. Then the third stanza folds in on itself: the snow falls "from blue / through gray, mirrored / once, once turned over." The repeated "once, once" works like a mirror, with the comma as the glass. The sentence about flipping the world is itself flipped.
At the fourth stanza the voice changes from watching to reporting. "It has been shown that," "It has been proven that": the passive, impersonal language of a laboratory, with nobody named, which makes the claims sound unarguable and a little unnerving. The brain "can get used / to anything: eyeglasses that reverse / or invert the world, / nearly any loss." That list slides from an optical experiment to grief across a single line break, and the most careful word in it is "nearly." It admits a limit while sounding like comfort. Adapting is a mercy, but it also means the mind quietly corrects the world without asking us, and we stop noticing what has been changed.
The form supports this uncertainty. The poem is eight unrhymed tercets of free verse, with short lines that break in awkward places: "the human / brain," "the moon / could never be," "hills are never / so blue." Each break makes the reader hover for a moment before the thought lands, like a mind arriving slightly after the eye. The reasoning words, "since," "must," "if," give the second half the shape of a proof, while the plain, conversational diction keeps it from sounding like a lecture. Colour does most of the descriptive work, and only three are used: blue, gray and green. Blue is the most important. It appears in the hill, in the sky the snow falls from, and in the claim that "hills are never / so blue." Distant hills do look blue, and we know it, yet we still call that the true colour of the view.
The ending is where the poem earns its title. The last stanza returns to the second stanza's image, but changed: "four trees / can climb a blue hill / twenty-seven ways." The rectangles have become "ways." The argument also reverses itself. The poem has claimed that science proves we do not perceive the world as it is, but the final proof is the landscape itself, and it is offered conditionally: "It must be so if..." Everything hangs on a picture that keeps shifting. "Fugitive" fits this well. It means fleeting or escaping, and it is also a word painters use for colours that fade. The view the speaker is trying to hold will not stay put.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it turns a philosophical claim into an experience. It does not mourn the gap between the world and our picture of it. It treats that gap as ordinary and even generous, since the trees are climbing the hill in twenty-seven ways rather than one. The quiet word "loss" is still there, though, so the comfort never settles completely. The poem asks what it means to be so adaptable, and whether being able to get used to anything is a gift or a danger.