Dave Bonta's poem catches a small moment of early spring: male garter snakes have just left the place where they spent the winter, under a lawn beside an old stone well, and they are already searching for a female. The central image is the "throbbing knot" they form, a tangle of bodies that tightens and then comes apart "thwarted." Whatever they want isn't there.
The speaker mostly watches rather than comments, and that restraint is part of the effect. The question "Where is she?" sounds like the snakes' own urgency, though it could also be the speaker wondering aloud. The ending compares the snakes to "eddies of wind," and calls the shed skins "old skins / whispering through the grass." The mood is quiet, restless, and a little eerie. Desire here feels almost like weather, something that moves through the grass and pulls creatures along. The poem leaves them circling, still unsatisfied, with the sense that spring has begun but its promise hasn't arrived yet.