Snow works like a page in Dave Bonta's "March", and the poem is about two very different ways of writing on it. One is the wind's, which is random and endlessly inventive. The other is a fox's, which is deliberate and nearly impossible to read. Neither can be decoded easily, and the poem leaves us standing over the marks and wondering what we are looking at.
The first stanza sets up the wind's handwriting. The grammar is playful: "A four-pronged twig tumbled by wind / has left the oddest tracks." The line break separates the subject from its verb, so the twig seems to hang in the air before it lands. The twig is only tumbled, never an agent, yet the sentence treats it like an animal that "has left" tracks. The word "oddest" gives the observer a note of amused surprise, and "no two alike" explains why. Each tumble makes a new shape, so there is no pattern and no pace, and nothing that could be followed. The hard t sounds of "four-pronged twig tumbled" and "tracks" even make the line seem to clatter over the surface.
Then comes the turn, signalled by the flat, almost scientific phrase "by contrast". The fox is the opposite of the twig in nearly every way. Where the twig left many different marks, she has "walked more than a mile / in her own, earlier footprints". The stress on "her own" suggests a creature that retraces her path and treats her past as a road. The poem doesn't say why, and wisely so. Judging by the imagery, we might guess at caution, economy of effort, or an instinct to hide her trail, but the text offers no motive. It only reports what the snow shows.
The structure supports this contrast. The first stanza is one complete sentence that stops neatly at "alike." The fox's sentence will not stop. It runs on through "footprints," and then across the stanza break into "leaving a single set / of blurred tracks." The sentence stretches over two stanzas as the fox's walk stretches over a mile. The three short tercets are in free verse, with no rhyme scheme, and the rhythm follows the speech of someone quietly noting what they see. A faint echo does link "alike" and "mile" through their long *i* sound, as if the two halves of the poem were softly answering each other. The *f* of "fox" and "footprints" gives the fox's stanza a softer texture than the twig's clattering *t*s, though the final stanza brings the *t*s back in "tracks," "toes" and "pointing."
The last three lines hold the poem's central idea. A "single set" of tracks sounds orderly, the opposite of the twig's chaos. But the word "blurred" ruins that order, and the final image undoes it completely: "toes / pointing in both directions." A track is supposed to answer a question, namely which way did she go? Here the evidence is clear and unreadable at once. The fox has overwritten herself so thoroughly that her trail contradicts itself. Even the line break after "toes" makes us wait, and the poem ends on "directions," a plural, so the answer stays open.
That is what makes the poem more than a charming observation. The twig's tracks are meaningless because nobody made them. The fox's are meaningless to us because somebody did. Randomness and intention leave the same problem for the person reading the snow, which is that a mark is not the same as an explanation. The title adds a small, playful pressure. "March" names a month when snow lingers but spring is arriving, a time of change and blurring, and the poem's ambiguous tracks suit that in-between season. It is also a verb for walking steadily, which is what the fox does for a mile. The poem never says whether it intends this double meaning, but the word invites it, just as the tracks invite two readings.
Part of the poem's success is its restraint. In nine short lines it offers no moral and no comment, only observation, much as a haiku does. It leaves us in the position of a tracker who must decide what the evidence means, and who may admire the fox for staying one step beyond that decision.