Winter, in «Winter Den», is a season of envy. Dave Bonta looks at trees that seem to have solved the cold by going underground, then at humans who can't follow them. The poem alternates blocks of prose with tiny three-line verses, a pattern that recalls the haibun tradition. Its central question is what withdrawal means for creatures who can't hibernate, and where, in a cold and noisy world, a person might find a den.
The first paragraph builds the idea through personification. The branches are "outlined with more snow," a phrase that turns back on itself like a drawing traced twice. Treetops become "the bare nets of need," where the clipped n-sounds make the bareness feel almost audible. The trees "caress" and "collide" in the wind and make "moans," so they sound like bodies in pain. Then the poem imagines their escape: they retreat to "that silken matrix of rootlets and hyphae," a web of roots and fungal threads, to "trade fermented memories of sunlight for the bones of a mouse." That line is the strangest and best in the poem. Sunlight is stored and soured like wine, and the underworld runs on a barter economy of memory and bone.
The short verses work like held breaths. "A slow leak of breath / growing needles" suggests, judging by the imagery, breath freezing into crystals, and the word "needles" also hints at conifers, so the den and the forest seem to grow from the same exhalation. The "seedhead bending into / its own pit" is a small, bleak picture of something curving toward its own burial. Later, the "fetal curl / of rhododendron leaves" gives a plant the posture of an unborn child. These images keep returning to curling up and hiding, which the humans in the poem cannot do.
The prose turns wry in the third paragraph. "We who cannot hibernate, isolated in our boxes of wood or brick" is a flat, almost comic description of houses. Then the poem lists the ways people cope. A poet takes "a selfie taken by snowlight," a long-Covid survivor befriends a horse stabled below her flat, and a snowplow driver dreams of harvest, calling the snow "a wintry mix." That phrase is a weather forecast and a crop at once. The hen that "goes gaga over her egg" is pure comic relief, but it also shows small domestic joys carrying on under the cold.
The next paragraph sharpens into self-mockery. "What fever do I still need to break?" The speaker takes "a dose of Vitamin D with my morning outrage," putting supplements and news-cycle anger on the same shelf. The insults are drawn from winter and farm life: "salt-block ignorance," "black-ice tongue." Even anger has been absorbed into the season's vocabulary. The following verse, with "a snowflake's asterisk / in my windpipe," shrinks it to one cold point. An asterisk is a footnote, a small qualification, and here it lodges in the throat.
The last prose paragraph is where the poem moves from watching to walking. Snow falls across the valley "in soft syllables of Plattdeutsch," so weather becomes a language, and a Low German one at that. The speaker follows coyote tracks "back to a den," which answers the title with an actual animal shelter, and then keeps walking "until the last bit of daylight has drained from the sky." The speaker doesn't crawl into the den. He visits it and moves on.
The final two verses bring the human world back. A cell tower is "blinking / through the night forest," and it echoes the "nets of need" and the underground web of hyphae, so the poem sets a fungal network against a digital one. The last verse is deliberately ambiguous: "house shaking / from the oil furnace / from the wind." With no punctuation, the reader can't tell which force is rattling the house, or whether there's a difference. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its music comes from fragments, alliteration and the contrast between long prose sentences and clipped verses. It ends on a noisy, drafty house where the trees have the better refuge.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It doesn't offer nature as a clean escape, and it doesn't treat modern life as a joke. It lets the trees' quiet underworld and our blinking, shaking, over-connected one sit side by side, and it leaves the reader to decide where winter is easier to bear.