Most snow poems stand in awe of whiteness. Dave Bonta's keeps noticing everything the snow fails to turn white. His title promises "sixteen snapshots", and the twelve stanzas here work like a photographer's contact sheet: small, quick, unposed. Each begins with the same two words, "Spring snow", and then lets the eye wander somewhere new. A spicebush, a mourning dove, a black cat and a "No Trespassing" sign all get their moment. The poem is about a brief, odd weather event and the attention it rewards. Spring snow is a visitor that arrives at the wrong time and won't stay, so the speaker looks hard while it lasts.
The form is spare. Each stanza is a three-line, haiku-like unit with no rhyme and no fixed syllable count, though the lines are short enough to feel breathed rather than composed. The repeated "Spring snow" works as a refrain, and its grammar keeps shifting. Sometimes it is a label followed by a colon ("Spring snow: / the soft ground sinks"). Elsewhere it becomes the subject of the sentence: "Spring snow / clinging to every twig," "Spring snow / covers up the letters." The snow moves from being the topic to being the actor, and the shift is quiet enough that you only notice it on a second reading.
Colour does most of the work, and it is never simple. The spicebush "captures more & more of the sky", so the snow-laden branches seem to gather up the pale sky around them. The ampersand gives that line a hurried, handwritten feel, as if the speaker were jotting it down. The whitewashed springhouse walls "look anything but white", a wonderfully backwards phrase. Beside real snow, the paint looks dingy, so the snow makes ordinary white seem like a different colour. The same stanza of tiny corrections follows: "trunks glow green with lichen," maples show a "faint blush of pink," and a black cat crouches by a vole's burrow. The snow is a pale ground against which other colours come forward. Then the final colour note, "the woods won't be this dark again / until early summer", suggests (an inference, but a persuasive one) that the wet trunks against the white will not be matched in darkness until the leaves return.
Sound is the poem's second thread, and it frames the whole sequence. The first stanza begins at night, with the speaker woken "to the sound of swans". The last ends with "soft thumps as it drops off the trees, / water loud in the creek." Between them comes the mourning dove, which "adds / an extra half-note", as though the bird were improvising on the quiet. The repeated word "soft" ("the soft ground sinks," "soft thumps") and the many s-sounds in "spring snow" hush the language, so that the final "loud" lands with a jolt. By then the snow is already falling off the branches and turning to water. The poem has quietly been tracking a melt, and its order of snapshots, from arrival to dissolving, is the real shape of the piece.
Humans stay at the edges. The speaker appears only as someone who wakes, looks out a window and walks in boots. Human marks are the two things the snow most visibly changes: the springhouse walls and the "No Trespassing" sign, whose letters are covered. Snow cancels a prohibition without a word, and the poem lets that small joke stand without comment. The writing is plain throughout, with no showy metaphors, and the dead "stalks of Oswego tea" that "don fresh caps" are the nearest it comes to personification.
What makes the poem worth reading is its method. It does not announce that nature is wonderful. It collects small, exact observations and trusts the reader to feel their weight. Taken together, the snapshots show how a surprise in the weather makes familiar surroundings strange, and how looking closely can be a way of keeping something that cannot be kept.