A mannequin in a January shop window is dressed for a season that hasn't happened yet, and Dave Bonta's "Fashions" opens by letting that small absurdity sit there. The retail calendar has jumped ahead: the spring clothes arrive "three months after their October debut," a phrase that treats clothing like a theatrical premiere. The poem's central idea is a quiet contrast between two kinds of spring, one that is displayed and sold, and one that is actually made, slowly, out of soil and seeds.
The mannequin is the most striking image, and the poem is slyly funny about her. She "clutches the hem of her cocktail dress," with "an expression of frightened vulnerability / painted on her bone-white face." The word "painted" gives the game away: the fear is manufactured, a designer's idea of feeling. Yet it is also oddly apt, since a cocktail dress in January is something to be frightened of. "Bone-white" adds a faint chill of death to the winter scene, as though she were the one figure on the street with no blood to keep warm. The poem says none of this outright. It describes her and lets the reader notice.
Then the view swings around to the street. "Out here," the phrase that marks the glass between shop and pavement, "it's hard to tell women / from men in January's unisex garb." Fashion trades on display and distinction, while weather flattens everyone. The passersby are reduced to "dark parkas, hats covering half / their heads," and the line break after "half" nearly turns them into half-people. They "walk briskly, / no time for window-shopping," which is the poem's dry verdict on the industry's timing. Nobody out here has any attention to spare for a spring that is three months off.
The speaker then turns the observation inward, and the poem becomes most human. The speaker pulls "my fingers out of / the finger-holes in my gloves / & ball them into fists for warmth." Judging by the detail, these are fingerless gloves, a design that looks practical and doesn't quite work in the cold. Whether or not it is meant as a joke at the speaker's own expense, no one in the poem is winning against the weather, mannequin included. The break after "out of" makes the line hesitate and then slip, like fingers withdrawing into a sleeve. The ampersand in place of "and" keeps the tone casual, closer to a note jotted down than a statement composed for an audience.
The ending is where the poem turns. "I think of my gardener friends / starting their flats of tomato seeds, / filling their houses with the smell / of baked earth." Follow the senses through the poem. It begins with sight (window, painted face, dark coats), passes through touch (cold fingers), and arrives at smell, the sense that cannot be put behind glass. "Baked earth" is warm and dry, almost summery, a startling phrase in a poem set in January. "Filling their houses" suggests spring arriving privately, indoors, ahead of schedule in the only way that counts. The shop's spring has a debut. The friends' spring is simply started.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular beat. Its plain sentences and speech-like line breaks keep it close to ordinary talk. The sentences also lengthen as it goes. The opening runs three lines and trails off into the deadpan "as mysterious as ever," while the final sentence unspools across four lines and seems to warm as it goes. That growing ease mirrors the move from the cold street to the imagined kitchen windowsill.
The poem is significant for how much it gets from so little. It never lectures about consumerism or the seasons, and it offers no moral at the end. The arrangement of images does the arguing, setting a costume of spring against the real thing. A reader leaves with the sense that what makes a season is slow, physical and shared among friends, and that a window can only dress it up.