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This free verse lyric is skillful, but nothing happens in it except the flight of the quail--a moment caught--and the shift of colors that suggest the passage of time, the "noisy second" and its brevity.
I wish there were more tension in the language, something to counter the very clear sense with another thought just at the edge, or with a music more pronounced than this soft, even flow that goes exactly where it says it's going.
A couple of places that are especially lovely: the way the quail "bluster up," and how they "thread into" the woods.
And one place that raised the possibility of a surprise coming, without fulfilling the promise: lines 8 and 9, in which that "once hopefully made" feels as if it's going to lead into more information about some specific human experience.
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