A man walks along, idly kicking a rock, and a bird above him seems to laugh. That is all that happens in "Jay" by Louise Louis, yet the poem manages to turn a tiny, almost forgettable moment into a study of embarrassment. Its central idea is how easily a grown person can feel caught out, judged, even mocked, by the smallest and least likely witness, and how much of that judgment he supplies himself.
The poem begins with a pleasing bit of physical detail. The man "kicked the brush and let / a small rock skip / doing a dusty dance ahead of him." The rock is given a dance, which makes it feel almost alive, and the soft "d" sounds in "doing a dusty dance" echo the thud and scuff of a boot on a dry path. Then comes a small shift in who is in control: "finding it before his feet / began to toss it with his toe again." The rock goes ahead, he catches up to it, and the game restarts. Notice that the poem never says he decides to play. The game simply happens, an unplanned, absent-minded pleasure, which is exactly why it is so easy to be caught at it.
Then the jay arrives, and the sound of the verse changes. The bird is "jawing from above," a wonderfully chosen verb. A jay is a noisy bird, but "jawing" makes it sound like a gossip or a heckler, chattering with a human mouth. The word also sits right beside the bird's name, so that "jay" and "jawing" almost rhyme in the ear. Above him, too: the bird literally looks down on the man, and the poem's last word, "down," will complete the picture.
The man's reaction is the emotional center of the poem. "It made him flush ... a bird might / somehow sense the need to play / the old game 'kick the can' / should be inside of such / a 'great-big-man.'" The ellipsis after "flush" works like a pause in which the blush spreads. Notice, too, how the sentence stumbles along, broken awkwardly across lines, much as a flustered person's thoughts would. The phrase "great-big-man" is hyphenated into a single lumpy word, the sort of thing a child might say, and its quotation marks suggest the man is hearing the phrase as someone else's mockery. The irony is neat: the more he insists on being a "great-big-man," the more childish the words sound. Meanwhile "the old game 'kick the can'" shows that what embarrasses him is not wrongdoing but a leftover piece of boyhood, still living inside the adult.
The ending is where the poem turns its trick. He kicks the stone into the brush, a gesture of irritation that also hides the evidence, and grumbles "Clown!" We assume the insult is aimed at the bird. But the final couplet-like lines reveal the exchange: "'A great big man' was what / the jay threw down." The jay's squawk is heard by the man as an echo of his own self-conscious thought. Whether the bird says anything at all, or the man only hears his own voice in its cries, is left delightfully open. The poem suggests the second reading without insisting on it.
Formally, the poem is loose and conversational. There is no strict rhyme scheme or regular meter; short and long lines alternate, and the rhythm follows the movement of a walk, easy at first, then jolted by the intrusion of the bird. The few echoes, "brush" and "flush," "Clown" and "down," arrive almost quietly, and the last pairing, "Clown" with "down," lands with a small, satisfying drop, like a stone falling.
What makes "Jay" worth reading is its gentle honesty. It does not shout about childhood or aging; it simply catches a man being human. Most of us have felt that hot flush at being seen doing something silly, and have turned on a harmless bystander rather than admit it. The poem laughs at him kindly, and in doing so invites us to laugh at ourselves.