Dave Bonta's untitled poem, headed only by asterisks, reads like two quick notebook entries. The first listens, and the second watches. Together they make a small argument about what paying attention to the natural world actually involves. It involves reverence, and it also involves being willing to laugh.
The opening section is built almost entirely from the senses other than sight. We get a "gray sky," which is the only visual detail, and then "the smell of rain," followed by a run of sounds: owls trilling, a grouse thumping. The poem hands us a landscape without describing a single shape in it. Even the grouse is rendered with a faintly technical phrase, "low-frequency thumps," as if the speaker were measuring the sound as well as hearing it. That register sits oddly and pleasingly beside "insomniac screech owls," where a human complaint is lent to birds. The owls "exchange trills" like two sleepless neighbours trading remarks, and the verb makes the sound feel like conversation rather than noise.
Then comes the line that carries the section: "An enormous silence." It is short and has no verb, and it follows a list of sounds, which is the clever part. The owls and the grouse do not break the quiet. They seem to measure it, the way a few pebbles dropped into a well tell you how deep it is. "Enormous" is an unexpected word for an absence, since it gives silence size and weight, and the poem stops on it so that we are left standing inside it.
The date, August 26, 2008, then appears between the two halves, and with it the mood changes. "The hollow sound of claws / on loose bark" is another sound-first image, and the adjectives do quiet work. "Hollow" and "loose" prepare us for the "dead elm" that arrives at the end of the next line, since a dead tree rings and flakes differently from a living one. The colon after "bark" works like a drumroll, promising an explanation, and the explanation is deliberately ordinary: "another furious squirrel chase." The word "another" matters. This is routine, something that happens again and again, and the speaker has seen it before. "Furious" does what "insomniac" did earlier, loading an animal with a human emotion, and it is funny because squirrels so often look as if they are in a rage over nothing.
The last line is the poem's boldest move: "The chaser pauses to lick its genitals." After the hush of the first half and the almost lyrical "hollow sound of claws," the language drops suddenly into plain, physical fact. The effect is bathos, a deliberate deflation, and it is the point of the poem rather than a lapse in it. The poem refuses to let nature stay a mood. The same woods that hold an "enormous silence" also hold a squirrel with no interest in dignity. The anthropomorphic touches stop here, because nothing human is projected onto the animal in this line. It simply does what it does.
There is also a quiet pun in the verb "pauses." The poem is made of pauses: the gaps between owl calls, the stillness after the grouse, the white space between its two halves. In the final line the chase itself stops, and the poem with it. The ending is abrupt, with no moral and no tidy reflection, which fits a poet who seems more interested in recording than in explaining.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. The line lengths are uneven, ranging from the clipped "exchange trills" to the longer, rolling "another furious squirrel chase." Most of the lines are fragments. Only two or three contain a full statement, and that gives the poem the feel of jotted observation. The sound patterns are subtle: the soft repeated *s* and *l* in "claws," "loose," "lick" and "squirrel," or the hard clipped *t* and *th* sounds of "thumps" and "trills." None of it is showy, and that restraint suits the subject.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty. It would have been easy to end on the silence and leave the reader with a pleasant, solemn feeling. Instead the poem lets in the comic and the bodily, and it suggests that real attention takes in both the sublime and the silly. Nature here is not a backdrop for the speaker's feelings. It carries on, strange and funny, whether or not anyone is listening.