A squirrel eats some seeds, gets high, forgets where it buried its acorns, and a forest grows. Dave Bonta's "Glory Be" runs on that chain of cause and effect. It starts as a joke about a stoned rodent and ends as an argument about memory, imagination and the unconscious. The central idea is that forgetting is not simply a loss. The squirrel's lapses are how the future gets planted.
The first stanzas are all sensation. The seeds of bindweed "get high / in a gray squirrel's gut," and the world tilts: the bindweed is "winding / into a green sky," as if the vine had climbed up and taken over the heavens. Bindweed has a cousin in the morning glory, and the poem's title and last line play on that name. "Glory Be" sounds like an exclamation of wonder, close to the cry of a prayer, and it is also a flower. The final line turns the noun into a verb: "how the morning will glory / in those oaks." The pun lets the poem treat a drug trip, a religious feeling and an ecological process as the same kind of gladness.
The poem's picture of the animal world is odd and exact. There is a "ghetto of goldfinches," a phrase that is funny and slightly uncomfortable, since it makes a crowd of small birds sound packed and noisy. There are also "spiderling balloonists," a fine name for baby spiders drifting off on threads of silk. Next comes the single word "boundless," set alone on its line. After the crowded ghetto, the space around the word feels like a release. The squirrel then becomes "like a primate ancestor," which hints that visions, whatever their source, might be part of how minds grow larger. The poem only suggests this, but the comparison gives a small gray animal an unexpectedly deep history.
Halfway through, the poem turns from image to thought. "What gets traded away / for a gift of visions" reads like a question, though the poem has no question marks. The answer comes in the next lines: the visions cost the squirrel its "buried treasure maps," which "slip from memory." Here the poem draws on the real habit of scatter-hoarding. Squirrels bury food in many places and forget some of it, and the forgotten acorns "sprout." The squirrel's loss is the oak's chance.
The form carries this idea. The poem is ten unrhymed couplets, all lowercase, with no full stops. The syntax is one long sentence-like trail, each clause hooked onto the last with words like "which" and "allowing," so that it winds like the bindweed it begins with. Line breaks also split words. "Scatter- / hoarded" and "mind- / turned-world" are cut mid-compound, so the words are scattered on the page, just as the acorns are scattered in the ground. The sound is held together by repetition instead of rhyme. "Gray" and "squirrel" keep returning, and "glory," "green" and "gray" share their hard opening sound, which links the early images to the last line.
The most interesting move is the shift to "your gray squirrel mind- / turned-world." Until now the squirrel has been "a gray squirrel." Now the poem says "you," and the reader is pulled into its mind. What follows, "a whole forest grown / from the unconscious," works as a metaphor for human thought too. We also bury things: half-remembered images, lost plans, odd associations. Many are never dug up, and some of those come up later as ideas or dreams.
Part of what makes the poem significant is that it gives forgetting a purpose, which is the reverse of how we usually think about memory. It also shows that nature writing can be playful and philosophical at once. The poem asks us to see a squirrel, a vine and an oak as one process, with forgetfulness as the part that makes it work. The last line is in the future tense. The oaks will outlast the squirrel and the lapse that planted them, and the morning will "glory" in them. That ending suggests the poem finds the loss worth its cost.