Janus, the Roman god of doorways, looks in two directions at once, and Dave Bonta's title promises a poem about thresholds. What follows is a small winter scene in which almost everything seems to face two ways. Snow rises as well as falls, the season "could go / either way," and a witch hazel claims to be at once a grown tree and not yet one.
The opening sentence turns the usual picture upside down. We think of snow as something that arrives, but the speaker is interested in its departure: "The way the snow returns to the sky / is far more painstaking than the way it falls." The long line, with its slow, weighty word "painstaking," seems to do what it describes. Then the poem borrows the language of art. Near the end, the snow "turns from ground to figure, / from canvas to paint," a reversal of figure and ground, in which the white backdrop becomes the thing painted onto the world and then wiped away. The last phrase of the stanza, "the ladder / of its own self-effacement," is a clever double image. The snow climbs upward, yet each rung is a step toward vanishing. Effacement means erasure, so the ascent is also a disappearance.
The second stanza keeps mixing the arts. The snow withdraws "into a clef-shaped cleft" and waits "for its cue." A musical clef and a theatrical cue sit side by side, and the near-echo of "clef" and "cleft" ties them together through sound. Since the poem is in free verse with no rhyme scheme, moments like this carry the musical weight. The snow is not simply melting. It is an actor in the wings, and the speaker admits the ending is undecided: "This winter could go / either way." The short, stranded line break after "go" leaves the sentence hanging, as if winter itself were undecided.
Then the tone shifts. The witch hazel "measured itself against an oak," like a child being marked against a doorframe, and it speaks, or rather sings: "I want to be a tree, it sang, when I grow up." The comedy comes from the plant's small ambition set beside the oak's size. The list that follows changes the poem's look. The lines are short and each starts with a capital, like items in a proud résumé: "A bird perch, / An insect metropolis, / A gallery of lichens above, / And below, a husband to fungi." The vocabulary is borrowed from human life, with its city, gallery and marriage. That makes the forest feel like a busy, civilised community, and "husband to fungi" gives the buried partnership between roots and fungi an unexpectedly tender, domestic ring. The list also runs "above" and then "below," another two-way glance from a poem that has been looking both ways all along.
The final couplet delivers the twist: "True, I am all these things already, / But not as a tree." The witch hazel already does everything it dreams of, yet it feels it has not earned the title. The poem seems to be asking whether a thing is defined by what it does or by the category it belongs to. The shrub's longing is gentle and a little sad, but the reader can see it is mistaken, because it already shelters, feeds and hosts. Judging by the pairing of the two scenes, the snow and the witch hazel share a pattern. Both live in between states, one on its way back up and the other on its way to growing up, and neither is quite sure it is finished.
The poem is significant for how much it fits into so few lines without strain. It moves from physics to art to children's talk and keeps a light touch throughout. It also suggests that a moment of in-betweenness, whether late winter or an unfinished self, is not an empty waiting period. The snow is rehearsing its exit and the witch hazel is already full of life, so the doorway turns out to be a place where things are happening.