Spring in this poem doesn't announce itself. It turns up the way it does when you're simply driving home. Dave Bonta gives us three short stanzas, three glimpses, and almost no commentary. By the end they have added up to one idea: the season arrives as a crowd of temporary visitors, and a person on a narrow road is only one traveller among many.
The first stanza begins with a fragment, "A small cloud on the cliff / above the railroad tracks," which has no verb, as if the speaker were pointing rather than explaining. Then comes a dash and a separate fact: "the shadbush is in bloom." The poem never says the cloud and the blossoms are the same, but the dash sets them side by side, so the white haze on the cliff and the white flowers blur together. Judging by words like "hollow," "shadbush" and "one-lane road," the setting is rural hill country in eastern North America, though the poem never says so. It trusts the names to do the work. Even the railroad tracks fit the scene quietly, a man-made line running under a landscape that is busy with its own affairs.
The second stanza is the only place the speaker appears, and the grammar quickly takes the speaker down a notch. The line break after "on" pushes "our one-lane road" onto its own line, so the road's narrowness and its shared ownership ("our") come forward. Then the hawk "passes me going down." That is the language of traffic, applied to a bird. We expect the human to do the passing, but here the red-tailed hawk is simply another driver on the road, heading the opposite way. The title says "up," the hawk goes "down," and the whole stanza is one easy, rolling sentence, like a drive. It is also the poem's one precise glimpse of an animal. Naming the species makes the encounter feel observed, not decorated.
The last stanza is the most figurative. "Spring ephemerals" is the name for woodland plants that come up early and are gone within a short season. The poem names no individual flower. It gives us "leaves wrinkled and damp / like freshly pitched tents." The simile is exact, since new leaves do look creased and folded, as if just unpacked. It also echoes the meaning of "ephemerals," because tents are temporary shelters. The forest floor becomes a campsite where new arrivals have set up overnight, and "freshly" adds a sense of early morning and wet canvas. Look at the direction of the eye, too. It starts at the cliff and cloud, passes along the road, and ends at the ground. The poem's gaze moves downward, just as the hawk does.
Formally, the poem is three unrhymed tercets in free verse, with no regular meter. The first stanza is clipped and end-stopped, while the second and third are each a single sentence that spills across its lines. That gives the poem a conversational pace, a voice thinking aloud. The sound is quietly deliberate. "Small cloud on the cliff" clusters its hard c and l sounds, and "wrinkled and damp" is blunt and tactile. The long, Latinate words "emerging" and "ephemerals" are followed straight away by the homely "tents," so the scientific term is brought down to the level of a camping trip.
The compression and the placing of two images side by side recall haiku, though the poem doesn't follow a syllable count. What makes it worth reading is its restraint. Bonta never writes "I felt" or "how wonderful," so the reader has to do the noticing. The poem is also about brief things: a cloud, a hawk passing in the road, leaves that will be gone in weeks. At fifty-odd words, the poem is itself a kind of pitched tent, small and temporary, put up carefully, and open to whoever happens to be passing.