Talking to a porcupine is a faintly absurd thing to do, and Dave Bonta's poem leans into the absurdity. "Porcupine," it begins, on a line to itself, like someone calling a name across a yard. What follows is a mock-interrogation of an animal that has just killed a tree. The surprise is how the mood shifts along the way, from wry reproach to something closer to fellow feeling.
The first question is oddly intimate. Do the "sapless twigs of winter" taste "any different" on a tree that has been "girdled," meaning stripped of its bark in a ring so that it can no longer live? The speaker isn't asking whether the porcupine feels guilty. He asks about flavor, as if death were a seasoning. Then comes the phrase "this waste of a pine," which wobbles between meanings. It could be the timber-minded verdict that a good tree has been thrown away, or it could hint at what the animal leaves behind. The poem undercuts the judgment at once by finding beauty in the damage: the dead tree's "whited branches light / the grove like candles, / like candelsticks." The second simile restates the first, flame and then holder, as if the speaker were revising his comparison while still looking. A killed tree turns into something like a vigil.
Then the poem swings away from the tree with "But you with your poor eyesight / must favor the dark." The speaker imagines that the porcupine can't see this glow and wouldn't care to. The animal's tastes are "hollows & cavities, / the undersides of things." After that shadowy, almost philosophical phrase, the list ends on a flat, practical "unchewed bark." The porcupine's world is dark and close to the ground, and it comes down to a meal.
The middle of the poem turns playful and slightly cruel. The pine was "unwise to arm itself / with such soft & succulent spines." The joke is that the tree has copied the porcupine's defense and done it badly. Its needles are armor in name only, and the sibilance of "soft & succulent spines" makes them sound edible. That s-sound slides straight into the next line, where the tree "did nothing but hiss / like a gnawed-on road-salted tire." The comparison is jarring, since a tree is being likened to a punctured piece of machinery. But the tire brings the human world into the grove, and it plants the seed for the ending. Road salt, the poem quietly suggests, is something this animal might want.
The ending pays that off. "Slow destroyer" is a neat contradiction, because destroyers are supposed to be quick, yet girdling kills by degrees. The phrase works as both accusation and nickname, echoing the one-word address at the start. Then the bleached branches become "those bleached roads in the air," pale as salt-crusted winter pavement, and the porcupine is imagined passing along them. The final question changes the verbs. Earlier the animal "favors" and tastes, but now it might "long for salt." Longing is a human-sounding word, and it recasts the destroyer as a creature of appetite and need.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. Its short, uneven lines let the sense drift from one to the next, and "you've just girdled," left hanging at a line's end, has the feel of an aside. Only two question marks appear, one near each end, so the title's "Questions" are really a frame around a stretch of observation and teasing. The three ampersands give the poem a jotted, notebook ease that suits its offhand address to an animal.
The poem is significant because it refuses to cast a villain and a victim. It lets the dead pine be both a loss and a source of light, and it lets the porcupine be both destroyer and something that wants. The road salt may also suggest that human traces reach even into a quiet grove, though the poem only implies this. Its final question lets the reader sympathize with the creature that did the damage.