A blank white landscape can look like a place where nothing happens, and Dave Bonta's "Deep snow" quietly argues otherwise. In three short stanzas, nothing much occurs: a squirrel finds a nut, a person walks, snow falls from branches. Yet each moment is a different way of moving through the same emptiness, and together they say something about knowing, believing and chance.
The first stanza gives us certainty. "In all this blankness" sets up a world with no landmarks, and then the squirrel finds "the precise spot" where it buried its nut. The contrast between "blankness" and "precise" does the work. To us the snow is featureless, but to the squirrel it is full of information. The stanza makes its point by pairing a big, vague word, "all," with a small, exact one, "nut," and the poem ends the sentence on that small object, as though the nut were the only fixed point in the whole white field.
The second stanza turns to the human, and the confidence disappears. "Breaking trail with snowshoes" is hard physical work, and the verb "breaking" suggests the effort of making the first marks in untouched snow. Then comes the poem's most interesting line: "I choose to believe." The squirrel simply knows, but the speaker has to decide what to think. The belief is also modest and slightly comic: "I'm half-floating, not half-sinking." The same fact, a body partly held up by snow and partly pulled down into it, can be described in two opposite ways, and the speaker picks the more cheerful one. The repeated "half" keeps the claim honest. He does not say he is floating, only that he is willing to call it that. The line admits that optimism is partly a matter of wording, and it sounds like a real person talking to himself on a tiring walk.
The third stanza hands the scene over to chance. "Clumps of snow sail off the trees," and the verb matters, because "sail" gives the snow the effortless floating the speaker could only choose to believe in. When the clumps land they make "a random scatter / of oblong prints." Here "random" answers "precise" from the first stanza. The squirrel's memory is exact, the snowshoer's path is deliberate, and the falling snow leaves marks with no purpose at all. The word "prints" is a quiet echo: tracks are usually left by creatures, and these are left by nothing but weather. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's own trail and the squirrel's footprints are also in the picture, so the snow fills up with marks from three different kinds of agency: instinct, intention and accident.
The form suits this restraint. The stanzas are tercets of short lines, loosely like haiku in feeling, though the poem does not follow a strict syllable count. There is no rhyme, and each stanza is a single sentence, so the poem moves in three clear steps without strain. Line breaks do small, effective jobs. Ending the first stanza's second line on "spot" lets the reader arrive at the buried nut as the squirrel does, a beat later. The softer sounds of "floating" and "sail" contrast with the clipped, blunt "blankness," "spot," "nut" and "clumps," so the language itself alternates between heaviness and lift, much like walking in deep snow.
One could also read the poem as being about writing. The blank snow resembles a blank page, and the trail, the buried nut and the scatter of prints are all kinds of marks made on it. That is an inference rather than something the poem says, but it fits the way the final image leaves us looking at a surface that is newly marked and not quite readable.
What makes "Deep snow" worth reading is how much it does with so little. It does not lecture about nature or resilience. It sets a creature's sure knowledge beside a person's deliberate hopefulness and the indifferent patterns of falling snow, and it lets the reader notice the differences. For a student, it is a good example of how close attention to small things can carry a real idea, and of how a single honest phrase like "I choose to believe" can matter more than a grand statement.