Nothing in these twelve lines is called a storm, yet the title does the naming for us. A tropical depression is the lowest rung on the ladder of tropical weather systems, a spinning mass of cloud and rain not yet at full strength. The phrase also means a low mood, and Dave Bonta lets both senses hang over the poem. Instead of describing wind and flooding, he asks a question and then tries out answers, none of which settles.
The question comes first: "what faceless bureaucrat / wears so gray a uniform." There is no question mark, no capital letter, no punctuation at all, so it reads less like a query than a muttered complaint. The storm becomes an official, impersonal and unaccountable, and the color gray does the work. It is the sky, the uniform, and then, a line later, the "paper mask / inhabited by hornets." The repetition of "gray" makes the color seem to seep from one image into the next.
That mask is the poem's strangest turn. Hornets build their nests from chewed wood fibre, so the paper is real, and it also carries the bureaucrat's paperwork into the picture. The nest is "molded in a spiral around / its single dire orifice," which fits two things at once: a cyclone seen from above, with its pinwheel of cloud around a central hole, and a nest with one dark entrance. The vocabulary is chilling in its coldness. "Orifice" is a clinical, faintly ugly word, and "dire" gives it a twist of dread. The face the bureaucrat lacked has been supplied, but it is hollow, and something stinging lives inside.
Then the metaphors turn from threat to appetite. The opening is "a sump that swallows / all assumptions." A sump is a pit where dirty water collects, and the sounds (*sump*, *swallows*) are thick and sucking. What it swallows is abstract: the assumptions that a day will go as planned, that the weather will behave, that we are safe. The poem doesn't say what those assumptions are, which lets each reader fill in their own.
The last image is the best. Everyone expects a hurricane's eye to be a calm, watching center, but here it is "an eyehole that shuts / like some toddler god." The god is a child playing peekaboo, convinced that if he closes his eyes we will "just vanish / under sheets of rain." The word "sheets" works twice. It means sheets of rain, but it also means bedsheets and sheets of paper, tying the toddler back to the bureaucrat's paper world. The menace is a power that is huge and also immature, a system that behaves like a child with a child's blunt logic. The casual "just" makes vanishing sound like no trouble at all. What unsettles is that the toddler's magical thinking might be right.
In form, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no end punctuation. It is a single sentence broken into six couplets. The lines are short, with an uneven pulse of roughly four to six syllables, and many end on small hinge words, such as "around" and "that," that push the reader forward without a pause. "Molded in a spiral around" even circles on the page. Because there is no full stop, nothing signals that the storm has passed; the sentence ends only when the rain arrives. Sound patterns do quiet work, in the *m* of "mask" and "molded," the *s* of "sump" and "swallows," and the *o* of "orifice" echoing "uniform."
The poem is significant for how much it packs into so little. It never states a theme, but its progression runs from a bureaucrat to a nest to a drain to a child-god, and each metaphor replaces the last rather than building on it. This suggests that no single image can contain the storm. A reader today might hear anxiety about extreme weather, though the text doesn't say so. What it offers is a mixture of dark humor and dread, and the unsettling idea that the forces we can't answer may be neither malicious nor wise, only careless.