Dave Bonta's poem watches a summer landscape and keeps finding more life in it than it expected. It begins with a question about how many generations of aphids can come and go in one season, and from there it simply notices: chicory blooming where a drive-in used to be, spindly trees, spore cases and seedpods that look like eyestalks and space ships. The comparisons are playful, as if the speaker is looking at plants the way a child might.
But the poem doesn't ignore damage. A mountaintop "bleeds orange" where coal was stripped away, and the old drive-in is gone. Plants grow over human leftovers. Still, the speaker's reaction is not anger but openness: "we climb with / our mouths open," which suggests awe, or hunger for the place.
The mood is curious, tender and quietly hopeful. The ending, with seeds breaking free and a grape tendril offering "an ampersand," suggests that nature keeps adding one more thing, and one more after that.