What this poem is expressing is, how hard it is at times to identify birds. Some, like this one, look different from different angles that you view them at. When I spotted this little guy, I thought it was a Roadrunner, but they don't come to Minnesota. As you can see from the front, he is pretty thin. The key is in his profile. Do you know what he is? He's a Green Heron. I wouldn't have guessed that at first. These four photos were taken by me of the same bird at the same time, as he moved around.

This poem is a Terzanelle with a Septet Envoi.
The Terzanelle is a poetry type which is a combination of the Villanelle and the Terza Rima forms. It's what you get when you mix two super popular Italian poetic forms. It is a 19-line poem consisting of five interlocking Triplets/Tercets plus a concluding Quatrain in which the first and third lines of the first Tercet appear as refrains. The middle line of each Tercet is repeated, reappearing as the last line of the succeedingTercet with the exception of the center line of the next-to-the-last stanza which appears in the Quatrain. The rhyme and refrain scheme for the triplets is as follows:

1. A1
2. B
3. A2

4. b
5. C
6. B

7. c
8. D
9. C

10. d
11. E
12. D

13. e
14. F
15. E

Ending Type 1:

16. f
17. A1
18. F
19. A2

Ending Type 2:

16. f
17. F
18. A1
19. A2

Each line of the poem should be the same metrical length. The traditional stance on the Terzanelle is that the lines should be written in a consistent iambic meter, but there are plenty of contemporary Terzanelles that just aspire to keep the lines a consistent length throughout.

So for this Terzanelle, I chose ending Type 1, and threw out iambic meter to use an unusual mixed meter of a consistent 11 syllables. I also added an Envoi made up of a Sestet 5 syllables per line, and a rhyme scheme of aabbcc.

These photographs were taken by the author himself on July 30, 2016 at Lake Elmo Park Reserve.

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