Day doesn't simply begin in Dave Bonta's "Deep Structure"; it snaps. The opening, "day breaks / like a wishbone," plays on two meanings of "breaks," dawn arriving and a bone cracking, and then twists the old superstition. Whoever gets the longer piece of a wishbone wins the wish, so the speaker announces "how lucky" that "the longer portion / remains with us / in darkness." Judging by the falling leaves and scarlet vine that follow, this is autumn, when night really is the larger share of the day. The poem begins by treating a loss as a stroke of luck, and everything after it tests what that luck might be.
The answer seems to be attention. The darkness is not empty. It sits "under the interstate / in that dull / interminable thunder," and the long, stretched-out word "interminable" makes the traffic noise feel as endless as it describes. Yet the poem refuses to treat this as a wasteland. Falling leaves become "a school of salmon- / colored leaves" that "stream down," so the highway roar starts to sound like a river and the leaves like fish moving through it. The comparison quietly turns a human noise into a piece of landscape.
The line breaks do a lot of the work. Both "salmon- / colored" and "now- / worthless" split a compound word across a stanza break, so the reader has to leap the gap to finish the thought, much as a leaf drops from one level to the next. The second split also delays a verdict. The trees have been "given / scraps of now- / worthless land," and the word "given" sounds like charity, while "now-" hints that the land once had value and lost it. These are the leftover margins around a road, valued by no one except the things that grow there.
The sharpest humor comes in the sixth stanza: "a cylindrical concrete pier / is tree enough / for virginia creeper." The phrase "tree enough" is wonderfully offhand. It lowers the standard for what counts as a tree, and it shows the vine's resourcefulness. The hard, clunky c-sounds of "cylindrical concrete" and "creeper" even feel a little like the material they describe. The pier is also the title made literal, since it is the structure holding up the road. "Deep structure" is a term from linguistics for the underlying pattern beneath a sentence's surface, and the poem seems to ask what lies beneath the surface of this scene. The answer is not only engineering but persistence: a vine that has claimed the support and turned it into a trunk.
A less obvious pattern runs through the vocabulary. The plant life is described in animal terms: "salmon," "forked tendrils," "scarlet molt," "fox grape," and finally a "fish crow." The categories keep blurring. Leaves swim, a vine sheds like a bird or snake, and a crow carries a fish in its name. Even the sounds link up, as the f-words "forked," "fox," "fish," and "falsetto" cluster toward the end. The reader senses a single living system under the concrete rather than separate things labeled plant and animal.
Structurally, the poem is eight unrhymed tercets with short lines and no regular meter. Nearly every stanza ends mid-phrase, so the sentence tumbles downward without a pause. The lowercase letters and the absence of punctuation make it read like one continuous glance, a person walking and noticing. The final stanza turns that tone playful: "and now for / a fish crow's / falsetto caw." "And now for" sounds like a radio host moving to the next item, and the crow's high, slightly ridiculous cry follows the dull thunder like a comic punchline. Nothing is wrapped up, and with no closing full stop the program seems to carry on.
The poem matters because it finds richness in a place most people drive past, and it does so without preaching. It never lectures about nature versus highways. It lets a vine on a concrete pillar, a handful of leaves, and a crow's odd voice make the case, while the opening joke about the wishbone leaves the reader wondering whether the dark portion, the part we usually think of as the loss, is the lucky one after all.