The oddest thing about this wish for wordlessness is that it is built entirely out of words. The speaker longs to "toss aside sentences and syntax," yet the poem is one carefully shaped sentence, spread over six couplets. It has no full stops and no capital letters except the lone "I." The lack of punctuation suits the subject, because the thought slips from line to line without the usual signposts, as if the grammar were already starting to loosen.
The dogs at the center of the wish are described with a paradox. They are "silent" and they "hold the secrets of stillness," but they spend the poem running: "trail miles," "dashing through the woods." Stillness here cannot mean standing motionless. It means a mind with no running commentary. The dogs can move at full speed and still be at peace inside, while the speaker, presumably sitting still, is busy talking to herself. The one clean rhyme in the poem makes the point: "the trail miles they run are better than talk" is answered by "I'll let my words walk." Talk and walk share a sound, but only one of them is worth doing.
The poem's most inventive move comes next, when the speaker's words start to behave like dogs. She lets them "slink away tired / and sleepy and sated and pliant," which is how a dog looks after a long outing, flopping down worn out and satisfied. Her language is something to be exercised until it stops demanding attention. The piled-up "and"s slow the line to a drowse, and the soft s-sounds ("slink," "sleepy," "sated") lower the volume. "Pliant" is the neatest choice. It suggests something once stiff has gone supple, which is the opposite of rigid syntax.
The middle couplets turn playful. The speaker wants to "lie sunning grassily," using an adverb that is slightly absurd and sounds as lazy as the scene it describes. She will "love my lapse into hours letters-free." A lapse is normally a failure, a slip, and here it becomes something to love. "Letters-free" is coined on the pattern of "sugar-free," as though writing were an ingredient she could cut out. "Letters" may also quietly mean correspondence, the duty of replying. When she says she will "toss aside" her sentences, the verb has a stick-throwing ring, though that is an inference rather than anything the poem states.
The ending is the subtlest part. "So I may find whatever peace I suspect / dogs never know a vacancy in their lives" has no punctuation to settle it. One reading is "whatever peace I suspect," followed by a new thought about dogs. Another is "I suspect dogs never know a vacancy." Either way, the word "suspect" is an honest admission. The speaker is guessing at what goes on inside a dog and projecting her own longing onto it. "Vacancy" carries a second meaning. She wants an emptied mind, yet she imagines dogs never feel emptiness at all. Their wordlessness isn't a lack, so what she hopes to reach as a vacancy they simply live in as fullness.
The last line, "wild as wordless wind," lets the w-sounds blow through, and the poem finishes on the dogs and not on the speaker. Everything in it is conditional: "may my mind," "one day," "may I lie." She trots behind the dogs and hasn't caught up with them. That restraint is the poem's main strength, since it never claims to have reached the peace it describes.
The poem is worth reading closely because its form acts out its argument. It uses language's own tools (sound, rhythm, a coined word or two) to praise something language can't quite hold, and it does so without solemnity. The speaker admires the dogs, laughs a little at herself, and lets her words go for a long walk.