A white flag is one of the loudest silent things we know: it says everything without a sound. Dave Bonta starts «Unseasonable» there, then complicates it at once with the simile "silent as a flower." Flags flap and signal, while flowers simply open. The comparison nudges surrender away from the battlefield and toward something gentler, a giving-up that feels like blooming. The white thing might even be a literal blossom, or a patch of mist. The poem never says, and that refusal to name is part of how it works.
The second couplet brings the strangest image: "a soup made of water / and the infinite." Soup is domestic, warm and humble, while the infinite is the one thing you cannot ladle into a bowl. Putting them in the same recipe makes vastness almost tasteable. Readers who know "pea soup" as a phrase for thick fog may hear it here, and judging by the imagery, the poem may describe air so saturated that water and sky blur together, though it doesn't confirm this. The recipe has only two ingredients, and one of them is plain water, so the broth is thin and bare. That brings us back to the title. "Unseasonable" normally describes weather out of step with the calendar, such as a warm day in winter. The cooking vocabulary also invites a pun on "unseasoned," a soup with nothing added. That reading is an inference, but it is hard to ignore. Either way, the title places the moment outside the ordinary run of seasons, which suits a poem that mentions the infinite.
The construction is spare. There are three unrhymed couplets, no capitals and no punctuation, so the lines drift one into the next like the mist they may describe. The line lengths taper. After the two-syllable opener, the lines run six, six and five syllables, then shrink to four ("all this thrumming") and finally three ("in the corn"). The poem seems to exhale. The senses shift too, from sight (the flag) to taste (the soup) to sound (the thrumming), as if the speaker moves gradually deeper into the scene. The first couplet is defined by silence and the last by noise, so the poem turns on the contrast between the two.
That final couplet holds the poem's most physical word. "Thrumming" imitates what it describes, with its heavy consonants and its humming "m" repeated like a vibration. Insects, wind, rain on leaves or the sheer pressure of growth could all produce such a sound, and the poem lets the reader choose. The phrase "all this" works like a gesture, as if the speaker were pointing, or were overwhelmed and could only wave a hand at the field. The poem then ends on "corn," a blunt, earthy, one-syllable word. After "the infinite," the plain noun grounds us, and the vast turns out to be located in a farm field.
Taken together, the poem suggests a cause and effect. The speaker surrenders, going quiet like the flag and the flower, and only then do they hear what was there all along. The silence is not emptiness. It is a condition for noticing that the ordinary world hums with life beneath its surface.
The poem is significant for how much it trusts the reader. It names no place, season, speaker or feeling, and it leaves the gaps between its three images open. Its compression and its juxtaposition of unlike things recall haiku, though it does not follow a strict syllable count. Its main achievement is to treat the infinite as something you might find in a soup bowl or a cornfield, a presence woven into everyday things rather than reserved for grand occasions. A poem this short can be memorised in a minute, and it still leaves a lot to puzzle over.