The question that opens Dave Bonta's "Summer holiday" never gets a question mark, and it never gets an answer: "in one summer how many / generations of aphids". An aphid's life is so short that a single season holds many lifetimes, and the poem starts by tilting our sense of time. A summer holiday is supposed to be a pause, but the poem shows a season in which everything else is working at top speed. The speaker, meanwhile, is just walking and looking.
What they see is a landscape with a history. Chicory is "blueing the roadside / where a drive-in used to be", and the verb is a small gift, turning a colour into something that happens. Where people once parked to watch films, a roadside weed now makes its own show. The poem quietly lets nature reclaim the spot without making a speech about it. Later the mood darkens: "the mountaintop bleeds orange / where coal was stripped out." The poem doesn't explain this, but the image suggests a mountain scarred by mining, and "bleeds" makes the damage feel like a wound. Judging by the imagery, the orange could be exposed earth or rusty runoff. Either way, the poem leaves it unexplained and unargued, set beside the chicory and the aphids as one more fact of the place.
The poem's form suits this way of looking. It is made of ten two-line stanzas with no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation at all. Without full stops, one glimpse slides into the next, and the repeated "and" ("and the spindly trees", "and the mountaintop") joins things as a walker would, one step after another with no ranking. The line breaks also do quiet work. "But we climb with / our mouths open" hangs on the word "with", so we briefly wait for what comes next, and then the open mouths arrive. They could mean awe, or breathlessness, or simply a hunger to take in the air and the summer. Probably they mean all three.
The imagery mixes the scientific with the playful, and the combination is what makes the poem lively. Bonta uses precise botanical words like "sporangia" and "achenes", but he balances them with homely comparisons: "sporangia like eyestalks / seedpods like space ships." Plants become alien creatures that look back at us and craft that might carry something away. The trees "stand in for angels", a modest phrase that suggests there is something holy on offer here, though only through stand-ins, and spindly ones. Their leaves are "green blades / for carving up the sun", turning dappled light into something sharp and almost violent. Sound adds to the effect. The s-sounds in "spindly", "sporangia", "seedpods" and "salsify" give the middle of the poem a seedy, rustling texture.
At the poem's hinge sits its plainest statement: "so much more than we know / grows in a summer." It is modest as well as grand. The "we" admits ignorance, and the poem keeps using that "we", so the reader climbs alongside the speaker. The fact that the poem never mentions what exactly we don't know is part of its honesty.
The ending is a delicate image. Seeds of salsify in a blowball "one by one wobble and break free", and the word "wobble" gives a clumsy, tender sense of things leaving home for the first time. Then a wild grape tendril "proffers an ampersand." The curl of the vine looks like the symbol &, and "proffers" is formal, as if the plant were offering a gift. The poem ends on a mark that means "and", which suggests that the list could carry on, and that life will keep adding to the sentence long after the speaker has gone home.
That is where the poem earns its significance. It does not tell us that nature is lovely or that mining is bad, though both ideas are present. It shows how much goes on in a place that has been used up, and it implies that attention is a form of respect. The poem is short enough to read in under a minute, yet it leaves the feeling of a long, slow afternoon spent outdoors.