Dave Bonta's poem reads like a walk through the woods, with the speaker stopping at one plant or bird after another. The language is spare and the lines are short, so each sighting gets its own small pause. A woodland flower, the downy rattlesnake plantain, has leaves that look "still twisted / from its rush to leaf out," as if the plant were caught mid-hurry. The speaker seems pleased by this, and by the "start" that each new spring growth gives.
The middle moment is the vireo's song. The repeated "vireo" is spaced out across the line, so you can almost hear the gaps between notes, and the bird's song "sounds blue now," a nice mix of sound and color. The ending turns darker. Judging by the imagery, the "pale pipes" of corpse plants look scorched by the act of reproducing, and the poem closes on a name that suggests death. The mood is attentive and quietly wondering, with life and decay sitting side by side.