Nobody expects slush to be called mellifluous. The word means honey-sweet, the adjective we save for violins and sung vowels, and Dave Bonta hangs it on the wet crunch of a tire in bad weather. The joke is already doing work by the end of the first line. Slush, in this poem, is a sound before it is a substance. The colon after the title word makes the opening read like a dictionary entry, but the definition on offer is acoustic: a word defined by what it sounds like. The sound is also a warning, since it comes "just before they start spinning." The poem is about how pleasure and danger can arrive together, and about the kind of listening that lets you enjoy one without being caught by the other.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It is three loose tercets of free verse with short lines that move at roughly the speed of a cautious car. The line breaks are carefully placed. "The tires make" stops on its verb, and the reader is left briefly suspended before "just before they start spinning" arrives. That small hesitation copies the moment it describes, a half-second when things are still fine and are about to stop being fine. The sound patterns do their own quiet work as well. "Slush" and "sound" share an opening hiss, and "soft snow banks" repeats it. By the last stanza the hiss has become a word of its own: "the welcome hiss / of leaves and mud." The poem's s-sounds drift through it like a tire on wet road.
The second stanza turns from sound to image, and the poem becomes playful and a little menacing. Snow banks are "soft" and "treacherous as Loreleis." The Lorelei come from German legend, where a beautiful singing woman lures boatmen on the Rhine to their ruin. Bonta turns her into a plural, "Loreleis," and the clumsy English s has a comic effect. It suggests a whole roadside of sirens, every drift a little temptress. The comparison is mock-heroic, treating a sideways skid in a car as a mythic shipwreck, and that gentle exaggeration keeps the poem humorous. It also links the first stanza to the second. The "mellifluous" tires are singing, and what a siren's song promises is a pull toward disaster. "Pulling the unwary driver in" keeps the word "unwary" for someone else, and that sets up the speaker as the opposite.
The speaker's response in the final stanza is quietly surprising. The old advice about sirens is to block your ears. Here the speaker does the reverse: "I steer gingerly with windows down." The open windows let in the very sound that tempts, but the speaker uses it as information. "Gingerly" is the key word here. It suggests careful, light-handed movement, and it slows the line down so the driver seems to be easing the wheel through the syllables. Listening becomes a form of steering.
The final image reverses the first. The sound that signals trouble is "mellifluous," while the sound that signals safety is a "hiss," a word that usually sounds unfriendly. Yet it is called "welcome." The hiss of "leaves and mud" means the tires have found something solid underneath the wet. The ordinary, unglamorous stuff of the road, leaves and mud, is the thing worth hearing. Judging by the imagery, the poem may be set in a thaw, when snow is giving way to the ground beneath it. That is an inference from the text, and the poem never says so directly.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. In nine short lines it manages a joke about vocabulary, a piece of mythology, and a small lesson about attention. It suggests that sounds can lie, that beauty is not always a sign of safety, and that the plain noises of mud and leaves may be the more trustworthy music. Anyone who has felt a car slip on wet ground will recognise the moment, and the poem gives it a pleasing shape.