Poems about the end of winter usually arrive with good news: green shoots, running water, birdsong. Dave Bonta's «End of winter» gives us nine words and no such comfort. The title tells us the season has turned, and the poem reports what the turning leaves behind. The ice has gone, and what the city holds now is ash. The central idea is a quiet reversal of the spring cliché. The thaw doesn't bring renewal. It strips away a cover and shows what lay beneath it, or what has built up in the meantime.
Look first at the opening line, "ice all gone." It has no verb, only a past participle standing alone, like a note jotted down while looking out a window. The poet chooses "gone" where "melted" was available, and the choice matters. "Melted" would suggest ice turning into water, one thing becoming another, which is a hopeful, spring-like idea. "Gone" is pure absence. The word "all" makes it worse by making the loss total. The three flat monosyllables fall almost like three dull knocks.
The second line brings in the poem's one extravagant word. "The city a treasury" again leaves out the verb, so the metaphor is made by placing the two nouns side by side, with no "is" to soften the claim. A treasury is a place of stored wealth, guarded and valuable, and the word has a grand, even ceremonial sound. It rolls across the line in its three syllables, and the line itself is the longest of the three. The line break after "treasury" then does the poem's real work. We expect the phrase to continue with something precious, and the stanza drops us onto "of ash."
That drop is built into the poem's shape. The lines run roughly three syllables, then seven, then two, so the poem swells and collapses, and the last line is the smallest. Nothing rhymes, but the sounds are carefully arranged. "Ice" and "ash" both begin on a vowel and both contain a hissing consonant, so they seem related, as though one were the other's afterlife. The s-sounds in "city" and "treasury" run through the middle of the poem and settle into the soft "sh" of the last word, which sounds like a fire dying or a hush. Even the vowels go from the bright, long "i" of "ice" to the short, matte "a" of "ash." The poem has no capital letters and no closing full stop, so it seems to trail off, as if the last word were drifting away.
The images work as a pair of opposites. Ice is clear, hard and reflective, and it can be seen through. Ash is grey, soft and opaque, and it is what is left once something has burned. Cold and heat, brightness and dullness, solid and powder all sit at either end of the poem. Neither ice nor ash is a beginning. Both are leftovers, and the poem moves from one kind of leftover to another.
The poem does not say where the ash comes from, and that silence leaves room for more than one reading. In a darker one, the city is a ruin and its "treasury" is bitterly ironic, since its riches have turned out to be waste. In a gentler one, the judging by the imagery, ash is also the evidence of warmth: the residue of whatever was burned to get through the cold months. The city has then literally stored up what winter cost it, and "treasury" is an affectionate word for that record of survival. The poem does not choose between these readings, and holding both is part of its pleasure. "Treasury" can even suggest an anthology, a "treasury of verse," so the city may also be a book of what has been used up.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much with so little. It takes a familiar moment, the first sight of bare ground after winter, and refuses the expected relief. Its force comes from the gap between the grand word and the humble thing it holds. A reader who gets to "ash" feels the mood shift sharply, and does so in the time it takes to read eight words.