Nothing in "Wake" is actually seen. Fog has swallowed the world an hour before dawn, and all the speaker has is sound: voices coming down out of the dark. The poem never says whose voices they are, but the clues (shadows moving against the stars, a tundra where night lasts for months, "treble notes") suggest migrating birds passing overhead. That is an inference, and the poem seems happy to leave it as one. It records an encounter rather than an identification, and then the strange way an encounter keeps going after it is over.
The opening simile does the most work. The voices drift down "like the first & most perfect / snow crystals of the year." Sound becomes something you could feel on your skin, and it arrives with the hush of a first snowfall rather than the racket we might expect from a flock. "Perfect" is a big word, but the line break lets it hang at the end of the line before we reach "snow crystals," so the delay feels like watching something descend. The ampersand in place of "and" gives the line a quick, jotted look, as if the speaker is writing this down before it escapes. Soft f sounds ("fog," "first," "far-off") run through the poem and keep the mood muffled.
The second stanza begins with a confession: "I picture." The fog has blocked the view, so imagination takes over. The snow comes back in a new form, "snow disappearing / into dark water," and the line break makes the snow vanish just as we read the word. The stanza is one long sentence of three images with no connecting logic, like a mind assembling a scene from fragments. Then the camera swings out to "a far-off tundra / where the night goes on for months." In a few lines the poem jumps from a porch to the top of the world. The voices act as messengers, carrying a distant place into the speaker's own dark morning.
The third stanza brings us back to the body. "I lean out over the porch rail" is flat and physical, the plainest line in the poem, and the speaker finally acts, leaning toward something that cannot be seen. The creek, running high after the rains, adds its own noise, so the speaker is now listening through water as well as fog. Then comes the sharpest turn: "Two weeks later I'm still hearing / the last treble notes." The present tense stretches to cover the whole fortnight. It is hard to say whether those notes belong to the birds or to the creek's high, bright chatter, and after two weeks they may have blurred together in memory.
That blur is where the title opens up. "Wake" can mean the hour of waking, which fits the pre-dawn setting. It can mean the disturbance left behind something that has passed, and the poem is, in effect, the speaker's wake: the ripple still moving long after the voices are gone. It can also mean a vigil kept over something departing. I'd say that last sense is the quietest, but the poem's attention to the "last" notes of a season hints at it.
The form is simple. There are three quatrains with no rhyme and no regular meter, and the line lengths vary the way breath does. The sentences are conversational, and the poem moves in a clear sequence: hearing, imagining, acting, remembering. It ends on "notes," a sound that is fading but not quite finished, and the poem gives no tidy conclusion.
What makes "Wake" worth reading is its honesty about perception. The speaker never claims to know what passed overhead and never tells us what it means. Instead the poem shows how little it takes, a few seconds of sound in the fog, to rearrange a person's attention for weeks. It suggests that we are shaped as much by what we only half-catch as by what we see clearly.