Nine lines, three stanzas, one hot day: Dave Bonta's "First hot day" moves a long way in the time it takes to read it twice. On the surface it is about someone out among trees in the first real heat of the year who stops, crouches, and finds a mushroom. Its central idea is quieter. Attention is a kind of travel, and the best journey in the poem runs from the enormous (trees, sun) to the tiny (the pitted cap of a morel), where the speaker briefly becomes the giant.
The scale game starts in the first two lines. "Huge tulip poplars" are "holding tiny leaves to the light," as if the trees were offering something small and precious in cupped hands. Then comes the strangest image, "each with its four incisors." Incisors are cutting teeth, so the leaf's pointed lobes (that, at least, is what the image seems to draw on) turn into little mouths. The stanza has no main verb and ends on a dash, so the reader waits a beat for the other shoe to drop.
It drops with a shrug: "the sun doesn't stand a chance." The lowercase "the" shows the sentence spilling over the dash, and the everyday phrase turns the scene into a fight in which the toothy leaves will chew up the light. But the next line undercuts the boast. "Already it's staging a sunset / on the back of my neck." "Already" carries the surprise of a body caught off guard by early heat. "Staging" makes the sun a showman, and the "sunset" is the reddening glow of skin that is warming or beginning to burn. The leaves are still tiny, so the confidence of the first stanza reads either as a promise about weeks to come or as a small joke at the speaker's expense. Judging by the title, this is the first hot day, and the sun has not yet been tamed.
The sentence runs straight across the stanza break into "as I crouch down," and the timing matters. The crouch is what exposes the neck, so the sunset and the stooping happen together. The line also ends on the word "down," so the reader's eye drops with the speaker's body. Up to this point the poem has looked skyward, at canopy, light and sun. Now it turns to the ground, where the speaker will "puzzle over the maze of roads / on a yellow morel." The ridges and hollows of the mushroom become a map, and "roads" brings human travel to a patch of fungus. A person who felt small under huge trees is now bent over a landscape so tiny it needs a map. "Puzzle" is the right verb: it suggests a pleasure in not quite understanding. The word "yellow" also quietly echoes the sun the poem began by squaring up to, now shrunk to a colour on the forest floor.
Formally, the poem is spare. It is in free verse, with no rhyme and short lines of roughly five to eight syllables, so it sounds like someone thinking aloud. Its music comes from consonants rather than end-sounds. The crisp t's and l's of "tulip poplars / holding tiny leaves to the light" give way to the hissing s and st of "sun," "stand," "staging" and "sunset," as if the sun's name were being worked into the sentence on purpose. The three stanzas also differ in grammar and mood: a fragment, a deadpan punchline, and a trailing clause that ends in a small act of looking.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without announcing a lesson. It is funny, with its biting leaves and theatrical sun, but it is also physical, because we feel the heat on that neck. The tiny and the huge swap places more than once: the leaves are small but have teeth, the sun is vast but is reduced to a stage effect, and the speaker is the observed target of the heat and then the towering observer of a mushroom. The poem refuses to tidy any of this up. It ends mid-puzzle, on the morel, and suggests that paying close attention is its own reward, even when the map doesn't resolve into an answer.