Bonta's untitled sequence, headed only by asterisks, reads like a diary kept through the deadest part of the year. Groundhog Day and Presidents' Day both turn up, so the poems seem to cover a stretch of February, though the text never says so outright. The speaker is bald, snowflakes tap his head like a woodpecker, and he "tunnel[s] through the day / half awake." The word "subnivean" names the space beneath the snow where small animals shelter. By choosing it, the speaker places himself among the mice, sleepy and half buried, getting by.
What keeps this from becoming a standard winter meditation is the humor. Cabin fever produces a potato "flaky / as old wood." The cold moon makes the speaker recall being born "ass-first." The pool of meltwater shows a reflection that "keeps shivering," which is the physics of ripples and also the speaker's own body. These jokes are small but they matter. They let the poems admit boredom and discomfort, so the later moments of wonder feel earned, not decorative.
The form is loose and disciplined at once. Each piece is an unrhymed three-line unit with no regular meter, close to haiku or senryu in spirit. Many open with a short label, such as "Groundhog Day," "cabin fever," or "meltwater pool," and then swing sideways. The line breaks do much of the work. In "white-footed / the way my memory places / mouse tracks in snow," the first line hangs in the air, and only later do we see it names the mouse. In "the former coal town living / off a shadow," the break lets "shadow" mean the groundhog's ritual and also the faded industry the town can no longer lean on, though the poem only suggests the second reading. Sound adds texture too. "A flutter of snowflakes / a flurry of snowbirds" stutters with f's and s's until it lands on the quiet, surprising "afterlife of seeds."
Scale is the sequence's most interesting trick. It moves constantly between the tiny and the enormous. There is "space / between night-time snowflakes / for warp speed," a gap just wide enough for science fiction. "As above / so below" is followed by "the color of absence," which turns an old mystical phrase into a description of white. Then comes the moon: first the "cold moon," then a Chinese probe "growing plants," so that even space is not wholly barren. The mountain that "will bury us" sits close to a spider crossing snow, where the land is felt as "granularity" underfoot. The poems keep suggesting that a person standing in a yard is also standing in a cosmos.
Underneath the cold runs a steady thread of persistence. Seeds wait, mice leave tracks, and ice "fits / each body / of water," taking the shape of whatever holds it, which sounds a little like the poem's own method of fitting itself to each moment. Even the political jab is practical: on Presidents' Day, "to build a fire / any refuse will do." The word is ambiguous on the page, and it is tempting to hear both "garbage" and "decline." The porcupine "squeezing / through a deer fence" is "somehow proverbial," a wry admission that the speaker is hunting for wisdom in whatever wanders past. Soon after, the winter sun is "hoisting all its bristles / into the treetops," lending the porcupine's quills to the light.
The last piece breaks the pattern. "You dance with everything you've got / wind / trees" is the first time the poems address a "you." The final lines shrink to single words, and the speaker's wry watching gives way to movement. Wind and trees are the dancers, swaying together through the cold. The speaker, who has been tunneling half awake, now seems to join in.
The sequence matters because it treats winter as a season of attention, not just endurance. It makes room for jokes, physics, and myth within a few lines apiece, and it lets one person's small, cranky, observant days sit comfortably beside the mountain and the moon.