Snow in dogwood season is the sort of thing people grumble about over the fence, and Dave Bonta opens "Out of Whack" in exactly that voice. "It's not every year we get snow in dogwood season" is plain, chatty, almost neighbourly, and the title's slang matches it. Calling the world "completely out of whack" sounds like a shrug. As the poem goes on, the shrug turns out to cover something much larger than the weather.
The form helps with this. Prose paragraphs alternate with two tiny haiku-like poems, much as a haibun, the Japanese-rooted mix of prose and haiku, would. The haiku don't follow a strict syllable count, and nothing rhymes. The music comes from sound and from where the lines break. Take the first: "spiderweb / catching snowflakes / their little spikes." The s, p and k sounds repeat until the lines themselves feel brittle. The pronoun "their" is also pleasingly unclear. The spikes could belong to the snowflakes, whose crystal arms are caught in the web, or to the web's own threads. The image shows two delicate structures briefly holding each other, and it plants the word "spikes," which the poem will pick up again in its last line.
The second prose paragraph turns from the weather to people. "Marooned in our homes, tempers fray" borrows the language of shipwreck, so houses become small islands. The poem never names what has stranded everyone, but the worries about "finances and food shortages" suggest a period of crisis and confinement. The speaker doesn't explain further and moves on to the birds. Scarlet tanagers are "treetop birds," yet here they are "reduced to feeding near the ground and foraging for invertebrates in the creek." The word "reduced" does a lot of work. The birds have lost their usual height and ease, and the humans have lost theirs. Neither comparison is spelled out, which keeps it from feeling like a lesson.
Then comes the second haiku: "redder / than our open mouths / tanager." Its syntax is delayed. The first line promises a comparison with nothing to compare, and the bird's name doesn't arrive until the last word, like a flash of colour in the branches. The "open mouths" can be read several ways. They might be hungry mouths, shouting mouths from the frayed tempers, or the gaping mouths of people who are simply stunned. The poem lets all three stand. It also gives the bird the last word, so for a moment the human complaints are outshone by something wild and brilliantly red.
The closing sentence is the quietest and the cleverest. "But spring is always a puzzle: the innumerable ways that spikiness blossoms and leaves us." The "But" turns the poem away from complaint. "Always" changes "out of whack" from a verdict on this one year into a standing feature of spring. And "spikiness" gathers up everything sharp that came before: the snowflakes' points, the prickly tempers, the cold. The verb phrase "blossoms and leaves us" can be read as departing, as in the sharpness passes. But "leaves" also hides the noun for foliage, so the sentence quietly makes the spikes put out leaves. Sharpness arrives, flowers, and goes, as spring does.
The poem is worth reading for how much it holds in so little space. It never names its crisis, yet it captures what confinement and worry feel like by looking at a spiderweb and a displaced bird. It also avoids both easy comfort and easy despair. The speaker doesn't promise that things will return to normal. He suggests that the world was never fully in whack, and that irritability, like late snow, is one of the ways life stays alive and changeable. That is a modest consolation, and the plain, observant voice makes it convincing.