A bird that hunts at night ought to have sharp eyes, but Nathaniel S. Rounds gives his nightjar eyes that are "ravenous," and what they crave is "car wrecks and sideshows." The appetite is for spectacle, the rubbernecker's hunger to look at disaster. Then comes a line that holds only the word "Or," a small hinge on which the poem swings from ordinary human gawking into something stranger. The nightjar's other craving is "the spectacle of writhing trees."
What follows is a strange and funny image. Trees with "gold leaves" tear their "short roots from the ground" and go to "drown themselves in merlot in posh cafes / Well past closing time." Autumn gold becomes a kind of wealth, and the trees become wealthy drunks on a last binge. The comedy turns grim fast: "Bark going blotchy and falling off / Bugs of every description eating them alive." The blotchy bark reads like skin after a bad night, and the line has no full stop, so the party slides straight into decay without a pause. One reading is that the nightjar's entertainment feeds on self-destruction, and the poem makes us watch the watching.
The scene then drops from the glamorous café to the bus terminal. The nightjar "sticks a quarter into a coin-op TV," a cheap, lonely, transient kind of entertainment, far from the merlot. The screen shows "black and white puppetry": a porcupine playing "a game of hazard / With a pelican / While throwing dice for both." The detail is nicely absurd. The porcupine plays both sides of a game of chance, so the contest is rigged and solitary, and the puppeteer's hand is half visible. The line "The porcupine says" then stops short, and the white space makes us wait for the show to speak.
When it does, the poem changes gear. The porcupine claims his "best teachers taught outside the confinement of schools" and names them in a plain list: "an old RKO musical dancer," "a retired social studies professor," and "an Irish grandmother." All three are past their working prime or outside any classroom, and the flat phrase "lessons of lasting value" sounds like a testimonial. Then the porcupine's temper flares. The teachers at St. Mary's (the name suggests a parochial school, though the poem never says so) are "rompishly caustical snobs." The adverb sounds invented, and the insult is grandly showy, a scolding of pretension in pretentious language. After it the diction goes plain again: "a miserable lot." That phrase nearly rhymes with "tied his brains in knots," the only real chime in the poem, as though rhyme is saved for settling a score. The accusation that they "drained a youngster's heart of life" is blunt and bitter beside the earlier comedy.
The form supports this unevenness. The poem is free verse with ragged line lengths, almost no punctuation, and capital letters that fall where the sense, rather than a sentence, begins. There are no quotation marks, so the porcupine's speech seeps out of the narration, and "At St. Mary's he says" drops its speaker tag in the middle of a line. The reader is never told clearly who is talking, which suits a poem about voices and secondhand lessons.
What is the central idea? The poem sets two kinds of learning against each other. One is institutional and, in the porcupine's account, deadening. The other is human, informal, and passed along by elders who simply enjoyed sharing what they knew. There is a joke built into this. The nightjar went looking for wreckage and got a lecture on education, and the lecturer is a puppet, a creature on strings, complaining of a mind "tied in knots." The wisdom arrives from a coin-op TV at a bus terminal, which is exactly outside the "confinement of schools."
The poem is worth reading because it refuses to settle into one tone. It moves from surreal comedy to the sour voice of someone remembering a bad school, and it does so without explaining the leap. The absurd images are not decoration, since they test what we look at and why. Whether the nightjar learns anything is left open, but the reader, who has also been watching, is invited to ask the same question.