Three small scenes from a cold landscape, and not one of them stays merely a scene. Dave Bonta moves from a maple tree to his own unsteady footing to birds on a road, and each image slips quietly into the language of religion: a lance, a wound, relics. The poem is about how an ordinary winter walk can start to feel older and stranger than it is, and about the half-serious, half-joking way we lay meaning over what we see.
Start with the maple. "Fresh holes gape" is a vivid verb choice, because "gape" turns the holes into mouths or open wounds, and "fresh" insists that they are new. The poem never says what made them. Instead it offers a comparison: "as if from some Roman / soldier's lance." The "some" is offhand, almost a shrug, but the picture is oddly specific. For many readers a Roman soldier with a lance recalls the one who pierced the side of the crucified Christ. The poem leaves that allusion unspoken and lets it work. The line break matters too. It separates "Roman" from "soldier's," so the lance arrives last, like a jab.
The middle stanza is the hinge, and the only one with a human figure in it. Its sounds change: "smooth," "ice and sleet," "set" hiss and slide, which suits a surface that can't be trusted. "New" and "smooth" sound promising, like a clean page, but the ground "hasn't quite set," the way concrete or plaster hasn't, or perhaps a belief that isn't yet firm. Then comes the plain admission: "I keep breaking through." It is the only line in the poem without a simile, and the verb "keep" makes it a habit rather than a single mishap. The title does double duty here. A breakthrough is a discovery, an arrival, but breaking through ice means a wet foot and a lurch. The speaker seems to be both at once, and the poem doesn't choose. Judging by the imagery, this is a season of transition, when the surface looks solid and isn't.
The last stanza turns back to the sacred, with humor. Cardinals are red birds, and the word also names church officials. The poem doesn't push the pun, but it hovers there. The birds "peck at the plowed road," and the hard p sounds sound like beaks on gravel. They are "gathering faux teeth," presumably bits of grit or gravel, though the poem never says so. Teeth are the kind of thing that was once kept and venerated as a saint's relic, and "faux" punctures any solemnity. It is a slightly prissy, borrowed word, and it tells us the treasure is fake. Yet the birds act as though it were real, and the longest, most ornate word in the poem, "reliquaries," arrives at the very end. The cardinals take their junk seriously, and the poem lets us smile at them while admiring them.
Formally, the poem is three tercets of free verse with no rhyme. Its short, uneven lines keep the rhythm close to speech, as if someone were murmuring observations while walking. The first and third stanzas are built from figures of speech, a lance and a reliquary, while the middle one is literal and personal, so the speaker's own stumbling sits between two acts of imagination.
The poem's significance lies in this balance. It finds the sacred in a maple, a patch of ice, a plowed road, not in a church. But it never lets that discovery become grand, because the speaker is no saint, only someone getting his feet wet, and the relics are "faux." The cardinals also work as a quiet self-portrait of the poet, who gathers small found things, such as holes in bark and grit on asphalt, and stores them in a poem as in a reliquary. Meaning here is not handed down from above. It is made by looking closely and sometimes falling through, and the poem is honest enough to admit it.