A title like "Pastoral" promises shepherds, meadows and a gentle rural calm. Dave Bonta gives us a field in winter, a dead squirrel and a bulldozer. The poem is about how little the countryside resembles its postcard version, and how indifferent its two kinds of force are: the fox that kills for food and the machine that clears the snow. Neither stops to notice what it leaves behind.
The first two stanzas tell a story without a single living creature in them. We never see the fox or the squirrel. We only read what the snow has recorded: tracks that "end," "a smudge of blood," "one tuft of fur." The poem works like a detective's reconstruction, and the reader has to infer the chase. The detail of the "dangling tail" is quietly brutal. A tail can only drag a "long furrow" if the squirrel is hanging limp from the fox's mouth, so we understand it was carried off, its tracks stopped because its feet no longer touched the ground. Bonta never says "killed" or "eaten." The word "smudge" is almost gentle, like a thumbprint on a page, and that understatement makes the violence more chilling. The snow becomes a kind of page, and the poem asks us to read it.
The form suits this plainness. The poem is three tercets of free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre, so it sounds like careful, quiet noticing rather than song. The first two stanzas are a single sentence, carried over the stanza break by "and the long furrow," which mimics the drag of the tail across the snow. Sound does some of the work in place of rhyme. The soft f's of "fur," "furrow," "fox" and "footprints" link the victim and the killer, and the short, hard "blood" and "blade" echo each other across the poem. The isolated line "one tuft of fur" is the shortest in the poem, and its "one" tells us how little remains of a whole animal.
Then the third stanza turns. "Alone in the field" sounds like the start of a lonely nature poem, but the subject is a bulldozer. The lines grow longer and slower, and "lowers its blade" has real weight. Machines in poems are often given a driver, but here there is none. The bulldozer is "alone" and the grammar makes it the only actor, which makes it seem as detached as the fox. The vocabulary of the earlier stanzas also carries over. A "furrow" is a farming word, and "harvest" completes the idea. The tail drew a furrow like a plough, and now the machine gathers a crop that is only snow. The phrase "white and heavy harvest" is a kind of joke with a dark edge. A harvest should mean food, growth and abundance, but this one is cold and heavy and will feed no one.
The poem's central idea lies in the pairing of those two scenes, which it never explains. We could say the fox's hunt is natural and the bulldozer's work is not, but Bonta doesn't preach. Both are acts of taking something from the field, and both leave a mark: blood on snow in one case, a scraped white bank in the other. The word "blade" also sits ominously at the end, since it recalls a scythe, the old image of death as a reaper. That may be reading a little into the text, but the poem's own use of "harvest" invites it. The suggestion is that death and clearing-away go on in the same landscape, one after the other, without ceremony.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It uses the genre of the pastoral against itself, and it trusts the reader to put the pieces together. It also shows how a poem can be built from observation alone, with no commentary: tracks, fur, a blade, and the reader left to decide what they add up to.