Riddles are a game of withheld names, and Dave Bonta's "Penn's Creek riddles" plays that game with a cast of creatures and growths found at the water's edge. The title promises riddles in the plural, and the poem delivers three tiny ones. By the last, though, the game has quietly stopped being funny. A puzzle about what lives beside a stream ends as a cold report of loss.
The first riddle is built on a single mixed metaphor: "a dark waterfall of fur / slipping down the rocks at / the river's edge." Something solid behaves like liquid, and something living behaves like a stream. The poem never says what it describes. A thick mat of moss might fit, or an animal, and the reader has to choose. The line breaks help the effect. The sentence hangs on the word "at" at the end of line two, then slides over the edge into the next line, just as the thing itself slips down the stone. Then comes "soft yoke / no neck will ever wear." A yoke is a tool of labour, a burden laid on a working animal. The pause after the word lets its weight settle before the next line cancels it. Here is a harness that nobody will ever be forced into.
The second riddle switches to a first-person voice, and the tone turns flat and challenging: "Though green, I am no plant." Its short words sound like a dare. The most likely answer is lichen, a partnership between fungus and alga, though the poem leaves that for us to infer. The clever line is "Two kingdoms live in me, but no ruler." "Kingdom" works in two senses at once, as a category in biology and as a realm with a monarch. The joke is that this living arrangement has two kingdoms and no king, a partnership without hierarchy. Then the speaker calls itself "a colonist of places / where nothing else can survive." The word "colonist" usually carries a human history of conquest, but here it describes a pioneer settling bare rock, and it sounds more admirable than threatening.
Notice how many negatives the poem uses: "no neck," "no plant," "no ruler," "nothing else." Riddles often define a thing by what it is not, but these negatives also strip away human frames. The fur is not for wearing, the lichen is not a plant, and nobody rules. The creek's small lives keep slipping out of our categories and our ownership.
The last two lines change the mood. There is no "I" and no puzzle, only a statement: "Death comes to the hemlock trees / in grayish white clots the size of pinheads." The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, but the sound shifts here. "Death" is the blunt first word of the line, and the line itself is the longest in the poem, so it spills out instead of slipping. The poem never names the cause, but readers who know eastern forests may think of tiny insects that infest hemlocks. That is an inference, not something the text says. The images do their work anyway. "Clots" makes the tree a body, with something thickening and blocking it as blood does. "Pinheads" is a small, domestic, sewing-box word, and it sets the size of the killer against the height of a tree. The earlier colonist returns here in a darker form. The poem has praised small lives for settling where nothing else can, and now it shows that small lives can also take over what is already alive.
The poem's shape adds to the effect. It runs four lines, then four, then only two, as if the poem itself were shrinking. A form that normally ends in a satisfying answer ends instead in an image with no explanation, and the reader is left to supply the meaning.
That is much of what makes the poem worth reading. It trains the eye to look at scale, at the moss and lichen and specks that most people walk past. By turning a children's game into a vehicle for something ominous, it suggests that the quiet, unnoticed parts of a landscape hold both its resilience and its fragility.