Familiar things vanish from view, and Dave Bonta's "Horizontal" starts from that admission: "it's easy to stop seeing / what's on the horizon." The people in the valley "don't really believe in it," as if the horizon were a rumour. The next two couplets explain why with a neat piece of symmetry. Summer makes the ridge seem "no less than a mountain," while winter shows it "as it is / no more than a hill." The parallel phrases "no less than" and "no more than" weigh the same landscape twice and get different answers. Bare branches give the speaker a truer measure, though a smaller one, so the poem begins by correcting the eye.
Then it widens. From the porch comes "a sudden influx of sky," a phrase that treats the sky as something pouring in through the gap the leaves have left. The next line, "look it's snowing," has no punctuation and reads like an exclamation blurted aloud. Bonta uses no capitals or full stops anywhere, so the poem feels like one continuous act of noticing. Its lines are short, usually four to six syllables, with no rhyme and no regular beat. The stress falls where speech would put it, and the couplets work like small breaths. Even the first quiet paradox, "lightness piling up," is delivered without fuss.
The snow stanzas are the richest in imagery. The earth, once "omnivorous" (a long, heavy word that suggests a mouth swallowing leaves, rain and everything else), is now covered by "a colony of the clouds / pale and puritanical." The sky has come down and settled. "Colony" suggests a living, organised settlement, and "puritanical" suggests plain, austere white with no ornament. Both words belong to a cluster of crowd images: the flakes arrive "in their multitudes," and the trees become "an absent crowd / dreaming / together / underground." Here the poem turns on a contrast between the one and the many. Against the white, "the individual / trunks stand out," each separate and dark. The line breaks then drop the trees' shared life downward in single words, "together" and then "underground," as though the sentence were sinking into the roots. Judging by the imagery, the trees look solitary above ground but are joined below, and their dormancy looks like a collective dream. "Absent" is a pointed choice, since the trunks are plainly there, but the leaves and the season's activity are gone.
The speaker is not a detached observer. "After my own sleep / i rise and look again" places the human sleeper beside the dreaming trees, and "look again" sums up the poem's whole method. The first look in summer was wrong, and the second look in winter was more accurate. The third look, after sleep, shows something no theory about perspective could have predicted: "on the underside / of a snowy limb / a gray squirrel is walking / upside-down."
This ending explains the title. "Horizontal" names the horizon line the poem opens with, and the poem then tests that flat line against verticals (the trunks) and finally against a complete inversion. The line break after "walking" lets the animal go on a moment before "upside-down" turns it over. The squirrel is not a symbol that Bonta stops to explain. It is simply there, and it is slightly absurd and entirely at ease. A speaker who has just learned that mountains shrink and earth turns into cloud now sees an animal who treats up and down as a matter of taste.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have ended on a moral about seeing clearly, and it ends on a gray squirrel instead. Its argument that attention has to be renewed by looking again, and again after sleep, is carried by images and line breaks rather than statements. A reader who reaches the final couplet has made the same small adjustment as the speaker, and may find that the poem has quietly turned their own view upside-down.