Most New Year poems look back, or make promises. Dave Bonta's gives the occasion to a squirrel, who does something simpler and more physical: he wakes a tree up. The poem is a small act of persuasion, an animal rubbing its face against cold bark and insisting that the bare winter world is still full of ways forward.
It opens with the flat, fable-like "The squirrel says," and then the speech begins. The sentences are compressed and sometimes odd. "Leafless now and clear / all likely pathways" has to be unpacked: the branches are bare, so every route through the canopy lies open. The tree is "she," and she is given a face. She "peers / bleary-eyed through every scar / that used to be a leaf." The detail is both tender and exact, because leaf scars really do mark a twig after the leaves have fallen. She is "stiff and cold / and full of old voices," as if the tree were an elderly sleeper holding everything it has ever heard. The squirrel's "wake up!" is the poem's first real jolt, and it comes just after he rubs his face and neck against her. The gesture reads as affectionate and a little rough, like shaking someone out of sleep.
From there the poem speeds up. "My tail trembles" is a small bodily tremor, and it sets off a series of transformations: "I am rainwater running / up and down the trunk," and then "from tree to tree I am wind / leaping." Water cannot run up a trunk, so the squirrel is already working with imagination as much as observation. He becomes the elements that would normally pass through a tree, and in doing so he supplies the movement and moisture the dormant tree lacks. The verbs ("running," "leaping," "making the treetops sway") carry the energy, while the earlier description of the tree is all adjectives of stillness.
The word "possible" does the most work. The squirrel first mentions "likely pathways," which are the visible routes, but then the poem shifts into the language of potential: "Every possible gulf / of space is spanned / by a possible branch," and he tastes "the kernels / at the tips of possible twigs." Nothing is actually there to eat, and the kernels exist only in anticipation. That is the poem's central idea. A new year is a gap to be crossed on faith, and a squirrel is a good figure for it, since leaping depends on trusting that something will be there to land on. The command "look!" pulls the reader into that trust.
The poem has no rhyme and no fixed meter. The lines are short and the rhythm is speech-like, with sentences breaking across line endings ("the trees / in which I have slept") so that thought spills past the line the way a body keeps moving past a branch. The short, hard words in the tree's description ("stiff and cold," "bark," "scar") give way to looser, more musical phrases once the squirrel starts to leap.
The ending refuses to settle. "And within me, now, too, / sunlight on branches" brings back the opening claim that the trees are "the color of the sun," and the outer light has become an inner one. Then comes the closing pair of fragments: "Aching blue sky of January. / Cries of thirst." Neither has a verb, and neither is quite consoling. The sky aches, and the thirst is unattributed. It might belong to the squirrel, to the tree, or to those "old voices." After all the rainwater and wind, the poem ends on want. The poem seems to be saying that renewal does not cancel the hardness of midwinter. It starts from it, and the cold and the longing are part of what makes the leaping necessary.
That mix of delight and ache is what makes the poem worth reading. It gives the New Year to a nonhuman voice and asks us to see the season as the squirrel does: bare, bright, thirsty and full of possible branches.