A walk in the woods becomes, in Dave Bonta's "Landmark," a small lesson in how little the world needs us to steer by. Not much happens. A man walks between trees, clouds pass over a ridge, a raven tumbles through the air and keeps him company briefly. But the poem is built so that these ordinary events loosen the speaker's hold on time and, at the very end, on his own importance.
It begins with sound. "The trees clack / & sway" is an exact, slightly comic bit of onomatopoeia. The word "clack" suggests dry, hard wood knocking together rather than the soft "rustle" we expect from woods in poems. Then the poem turns to light. Cloud-shadows "race over / the ridge, making the sun / flicker like a movie projector." The line break after "Cloud-" tips the reader straight into the next line, so the sentence hurries just as the shadows do. The projector simile is the poem's hinge. Flickering light is the visual rhythm of old film, and film is how we replay the past. Straight afterwards the speaker's sense of time breaks: "It's thirty years ago, or twenty. / It's just last week." The vagueness of "thirty… or twenty" is convincing, because memory doesn't keep exact dates. The flat, short sentences suggest a mind slipping between decades without effort, as if the walk were one more reel the light is running.
The raven interrupts this reverie with a "harsh cry." It is the poem's first sound that comes from a living creature, and it pulls the speaker out of his head and makes him "look up." What he sees is playful: the bird is "out flying, I'm sure, for the sheer / hell of it." The phrase "I'm sure" is honest and funny, because the speaker admits he is guessing at the raven's motives. The casual "hell of it" also keeps the poem from becoming solemn. The verb "kites" is the best choice in the poem. It turns the bird into the toy we fly on a string, so the raven seems to be held up by the wind and to be riding it for fun, "sideways / & upside-down." The line break after "sheer" leaves the reader hanging for a moment, almost as the bird hangs.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular beat. Its lines are short and uneven, and sentences run across them, so the poem moves at a walking pace, with small stumbles and recoveries. The ampersands add to this. They look quick and informal, like notes jotted on the move. There are quieter sound links too, such as "race" and "pace," which echo each other across the poem and tie the racing shadows to the bird that "keeps pace." The final sentence is the longest and slowest, stretching over five lines, and it works like a bird gliding after a flurry of flapping.
That last sentence gives the title its meaning: the raven "keeps pace with me / for half a minute, as one / might navigate by any / predictable thing." A landmark is something fixed that helps you find your way. Here the reading seems to turn upside down. The raven, which is wild and acrobatic and flies for no reason, ends up following the plodding human, who is steady and predictable by comparison. The judging by the wording is an inference, but it seems the walker, not the bird, is the landmark. It is a gentle joke at his expense, and also a kind of gift, since for thirty seconds he has been useful to something wilder than himself. The phrase "any predictable thing" is deliberately deflating, as if a tree, a rock or a man would do equally well.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It treats memory and time as something that can flicker in and out with the weather, and it treats nature as something that has its own purposes, not a backdrop for human feeling. The speaker doesn't claim any grand insight. He notices, laughs a little at himself, and lets the raven have the last, wordless say.