The title is a word most of us have never needed: "subnivean" means beneath the snow, the hidden world where small animals live through winter. Dave Bonta's poem takes that hidden world as its starting point, then slips quietly indoors. In nine short lines it moves from voles to a bag of coffee grounds to a bathroom floor, and what links them is a feeling the poem never names outright: a lonely, low-key longing for company, even the company of millipedes.
The opening simile is the boldest thing in the poem, and it is not a pretty one. "Like varicose veins / in the thinning snow, the dark / tunnels of the voles." Most poets would reach for lace or glass to describe snow. Bonta reaches for a medical complaint. Snow becomes skin, thin and aging, and the vole tunnels show through it like swollen veins. The sentence is built to surprise us, too. The comparison arrives first and the real subject only in the final word, so we picture a body before we learn we are looking at a field. "Thinning" suggests late winter, with the snow giving way and the hidden life underneath starting to show.
The second stanza turns to the speaker's own life, and the tone drops into something drier and more private. "My garbage is nothing / but coffee grounds, each morning / wrapped in its filter-shroud." The phrase "nothing but" makes the household sound spare, and judging by the details the speaker may be living alone. The word "shroud" is the surprise. A paper filter becomes a funeral cloth, and the daily routine becomes a tiny burial. There is humor in the exaggeration, but it also connects back to the first stanza. The speaker's waste is wrapped up and put out of sight, much like the voles' secret passages. The poem hints, without insisting, that the speaker is living a subnivean life of their own.
The last stanza is where the feeling comes out. "I miss summer:" is blunt and short, and the colon promises an explanation. What follows is delightfully odd: "those small millipedes that glide / across the bathroom floor." Few people would say they miss millipedes. That oddness is the point. The speaker misses not warmth or sunlight but small, ordinary, slightly unwelcome company. The verb "glide" makes the creatures graceful, and its soft sounds, with the slow l's of "small millipedes," are a long way from the harsh "varicose" of the opening. The poem ends on the idea of something moving, which is exactly what winter has taken away.
The form matches that restraint. There are three unrhymed tercets, and the first counts out as exactly five, seven and five syllables, the shape of a haiku. The later stanzas loosen, drifting a syllable or so either way, as if the poem starts out formal and then relaxes into ordinary speech. Without rhyme, the music comes from smaller things. "Grounds" and "shroud" share a vowel and tie the second stanza shut, and the long o of "snow" and "voles" echoes across the first. The diction is plain throughout. The one learned word is saved for the title, and the poem never has to repeat it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it lets small things carry. It never says "I am lonely," and it never lectures us about seasons or nature. Instead it gives us three images, each at ground level, and trusts us to notice that voles, coffee grounds and millipedes all belong to the same dim, low world. The humor keeps the poem from turning sentimental, and the strangeness of the simile keeps it from being merely cozy. After reading it, you may find yourself looking at a thawing lawn, or a bathroom floor, a little more closely.