The title does half the work before the poem begins. In physics, sublimation is what happens when a solid becomes a gas without passing through liquid: frost vanishes from a lawn on a cold, dry morning, and snow thins without ever melting. The word also has a second life in psychology, where it means turning a raw impulse into something finer. Dave Bonta's six short lines make room for both senses, and for a good deal of quiet strangeness besides.
The opening stanza is built from fragments with no verbs: "water back to ice / and ice to air." Nothing acts. The changes simply happen, as if the world were running a process of its own with nobody watching. The small word "back" matters. Water returning to ice is a reversal, a loss of warmth, and the second line pushes further, past ice into something nearly invisible. Each phrase leaves less behind than the one before. Even the missing punctuation and capital letters seem to belong to this thinning, since nothing is fenced off and one state slides into the next.
Then the poem turns, and the turn is odd. "Being no green man / I journey in our own garden." The Green Man is a figure from European folklore and church carving, a face half-made of leaves, a wild kinship between human and plant. The speaker disowns that role. He is no mythic woodland creature, so his travelling must be done somewhere humbler. The grammar helps here: "being" hangs at the start like a small apology, and the reason gives way to a modest conclusion. Yet "journey" is a large word for a domestic patch of ground, and the line is the longest in the poem, eight syllables against the five or fewer around it. It stretches out, as though the garden turns bigger once you actually walk through it. The phrase "our own" adds another presence. This garden is shared, so the speaker is not alone in the poem's world.
The last stanza folds everything together. "A bed in our part / of night" works two ways at once. In a garden a bed is a plot where things are planted and, in cold weather, lie dormant. In a house it is where people sleep. Judging by the imagery of ice, the season may be winter, with the garden bed asleep under frost while the human bed is slept in. The speaker's "journey" in the garden could even be a dream, though the poem never says so. Then there is "our part of night." Night is not owned by anyone, yet the possessive suggests the side of the turning Earth that happens to face away from the sun, a share of darkness belonging to the speaker and whoever is with him. A garden has become a planetary position.
The line breaks are doing careful work. "Part" ends a line and hangs there, a word that could also mean separation, before "of night" drops in as the briefest line of all, just two syllables. The poem ends the way ice becomes air: it thins out and is gone. The three stanzas each open on a line of about five syllables, and each is then followed by something that either shrinks (four syllables, then two) or swells (eight) before falling away. There is no rhyme, but the long *i* sound drifts through the poem like a faint echo: "ice," "ice," "I," "night." The speaker's "I" sits between the frozen water and the darkness, tied to both by sound.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it carries without announcing it. A science term, a folklore figure, a flower bed, a marriage bed and the turning of the planet all fit into thirty-odd syllables. The poem also behaves like its title. It skips the liquid middle, the connecting explanation, and goes straight from one state to another: from ice to garden to night. The reader has to cross those gaps without help, and in doing so ends up performing a small sublimation of their own. The result is an ordinary evening, in a small garden and a shared bed, understood as part of something very large and very cold.