A zebra never actually appears in the body of this poem. It sits in the title, in a slightly broken phrase, "Zebra This Hypnotic", and after that the poem speaks only of "they", as if the animal had dissolved into its own markings. That choice suits the subject, which is what pattern does to the person looking at it. The stripes are all that remain, and they do all the work.
The first line works as a small thesis: "repetition breeds fascination." It begins in lowercase, as though we have walked into the middle of a thought. Then comes a fragment with no verb, "Garish / contrast to more malleable surroundings." Huffman sets the stripes against a world that is soft and yielding. "Malleable" suggests clay or grass, things that can be pressed into any shape, while black and white refuses to give. "Garish" is a loaded word, since it means too bright, even a little vulgar. The speaker is not simply admiring, then, but reporting a pull that is partly an intrusion. The next sentence confirms it: "Vision is forced / to their direction." The passive construction removes anyone who chooses to look, so eyes are simply steered. The line break after "forced" lets the compulsion land before we learn where it leads.
The second stanza shifts from observation to surrender. "They are their own / gravity" turns the stripes into a physical field, something you fall toward whether you like it or not. Then the senses blur. Stripes are a purely visual thing, yet they call "eye / and ear (and heart?)" and we are asked "to listen" to them. By the last line the pattern has become music: "the timing / of the variation / of their beat." The word "beat" does double duty, meaning both a drum rhythm and a pulse, so the stripes end up sounding like a heartbeat. The parenthesis around "(and heart?)" is the only place the poem hesitates, and its quiet question mark is also the only moment the speaker sounds personal. Eye and ear are easy to admit, but the heart is a bigger claim, so it is whispered.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, but it is full of echo. Look at the endings of "repetition", "fascination", "direction" and "variation". All four share the same -tion sound, and they are spread through the poem at intervals, like stripes. The poem repeats a sound while arguing that repetition mesmerises, and as we read it the effect begins to work on us. The last four lines add another pattern, a chain of stacked phrases ("to the timing / of the variation / of their beat") that steps down the page one short line at a time. As printed here, the poem also ends without a full stop, so the beat seems to carry on after the words stop.
There is a quiet tension in the poem's logic as well. It opens by praising repetition, but its final noun phrase hangs on variation. Pure sameness would be dull, and what hypnotises is a pattern that keeps shifting slightly, with stripes that differ in width and spacing and a rhythm whose timing is never quite mechanical. The poem seems to understand that fascination lives in that small difference inside the repeat.
That is what makes it worth reading, despite its brevity. In about thirty words it describes a way of seeing and also reproduces it, through short lines, recurring sounds and a sentence that pulls forward without letting go. It also turns a surface, which is all a stripe is, into something that reaches the ears and perhaps the heart. The reader finishes the poem a little like the viewer inside it, caught and counting the beats.