Anyone who has walked through summer woods knows the mix of delight and irritation: the heat, the insects in your hair, and the odd sense that you are being watched. Dave Bonta's "Earth Tongue" holds all of that in a single walk. It is about paying attention, and about the humbling discovery that the thing you are paying attention to will always exceed your words for it.
The poem gets its energy from the way it handles naming. Plants and fungi turn up like items in a litany: enchanter's nightshade, rattlesnake plantain, jumpseed, stinkhorn, squawroot, fly agaric. They arrive in short lines, sometimes interrupting the sentence. "A deer fly stumbles — / jumpseed — / through my matted hair" is a good example. The grammar is cut by a botanical name, as if the speaker's eye keeps snagging on the ground while his body deals with the insect. The names are also lovely and a little menacing, and they sound like spells. Because the title is itself the name of a fungus, it hints at a second meaning: the woods have a tongue, a language of their own, and the speaker is only an eavesdropper.
The poem admits as much halfway through. "Listen, these woods are far stranger / than anything I can write." It is a clever confession, since the poem making it is the writing it calls inadequate. The strangeness arrives straight away in the next lines. The speaker finds "a mollusk without a shell, / a four-inch hermaphrodite." He never says "slug." The clinical phrasing makes the creature seem even more alien, and the later phrase "lubricated progress" is dryly funny. Then the roles reverse: "Eyestalks swivel to tune me in." The observer is now being observed, and the radio image suggests the slug is the one receiving a signal from this large, noisy visitor.
The imagery moves between the tiny and the enormous, and often borrows from human life. White moths on the ground are "flopping like landed fish," which makes the forest floor feel like the bed of a drained pond. The trees "sweat," and the spider is "the size of carpet tack," a flat domestic comparison that shrinks the threat. The speaker nonetheless swings his stick "like a fencer's foil," a mock-heroic moment that gently laughs at himself. Then comes the reassurance: "No damage done: this species of spider / eats her own web each night, / starts fresh in the morning." The speaker's flailing is harmless because the woods are built on renewal. Judging by the tone, the detail also works as a quiet model for the poem's own method, which is to take everything in, then begin again.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The poem relies on conversational free verse, with long, loose lines for observation and one-word lines ("Stinkhorn," "squawroot,") that slow the walker down. Hard consonants make those names crunch underfoot, while the long vowels of "daylong dusk of midsummer woods" stretch time out. Five stanzas of uneven length keep the structure as unpredictable as the terrain. The unanswered question "Who knows what goes on up there / where the leaves run out?" adds to this, because the canopy remains a place the speaker cannot reach or describe.
The ending is the most affecting part. A tree falls, "roots loosened by weeks of intermittent rain," and the forest absorbs the event. Right afterward a wood peewee "keeps bending the same two notes." The verb "bending" is musical, but it also suggests flexibility, a small bird continuing through a disaster. The last lines turn that bird into a character: "his fondest wish is for the clouds / never to part." The wish fits the "daylong dusk" established at the start. The speaker, and perhaps the poem, would also like this dim, damp, living gloom to last.
What makes the poem worth reading is its balance. It is observant without being solemn, and it is funny about its own limits. It places a human being among creatures who have their own routines, appetites and languages, and it lets the reader share that humbling view.