Six short lines are enough for Dave Bonta's speaker to lose his sight, meet something sinister, and make a decision. "Into winter" opens with a flat announcement, "My vision is going," delivered without alarm or explanation. We never learn whether this is illness, age, or just the failing light of a shortening day. The title allows both the season and a stage of life, and the first line makes the second reading hard to ignore, though that is an inference from the text and not a stated fact.
What takes the place of sight is hearing, and what the speaker hears is strange. The first line breaks on "I hear," leaving us briefly suspended, and the next supplies "a devilish tongue." Is it wind, a voice of despair, a temptation to give up? The poem doesn't say, and "tongue" slides between meanings: a language, a flame, an organ of taste. After the dash come two comparisons that don't behave the way comparisons usually do. The sound is "cold as a tumor" and like "vinegar boiled till thick." Neither can literally be heard, since one belongs to touch and the other to taste. As one sense fails, the others blur together, which makes the loss feel bodily rather than abstract.
Both comparisons repay a slow look. A tumor isn't cold to the touch, so the word must be about what it announces: the clinical chill of bad news, something growing where it shouldn't. Judging by this imagery, illness is at least hovering in the background. Vinegar is already sour, and boiling it down concentrates the sourness into something syrupy that clings. The voice is therefore both chilling and cloying, the kind of thing that gets under the skin and stays there.
There is no rhyme, and the lines follow no regular metre, but sound holds the poem together. The "v" in "vision," "devilish" and "vinegar" runs through the first four lines, quietly linking the thing that takes the sight with the thing that speaks. Hard consonants clip the middle lines: the "c" and "t" of "cold as a tumor," the "b," "t" and "k" of "boiled till thick." They sound like clenched teeth. The line lengths do similar work. The first five lines are short, five to seven syllables each, like shallow breaths in the cold. Then the last line stretches to about ten syllables, twice as long as the one before it, and the poem seems to exhale. That length is also a way of showing duration, since the line has to cover the whole stretch from now until spring.
The small repetitions in that ending matter too. "Till" appears twice, first in the vinegar boiled "till thick" and again in the coat kept on "till spring." Both are processes of patient endurance measured by an endpoint, as if winter were something to be cooked through or waited out. "Put on" in line five is answered by "put it off" in line six, so the sentence closes like a buttoned garment, and the plain, repeated verb makes the act feel deliberate. "Do not put it off again" is the grammar of a vow. The word "spring" waits until the very end, the only hopeful word in the poem, available only after everything before it has been got through.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it responds. The speaker doesn't argue with the devilish tongue, lament the failing eyes, or explain the symptoms. He puts on a coat. This ordinary, almost comic act becomes a form of resistance, a stubborn insistence on staying warm and staying put. Coming after such unsettling imagery, the tone is dry, understated and oddly tough. The ending also assumes a future in which spring will arrive, and that assumption, so quiet it is easy to miss, is where the poem's courage lies. Bonta lets the bitterness stand at full strength and shows, in a single long line, a person quietly deciding to outlast it.