Spring rarely arrives in Dave Bonta's "First warm day" as a bright announcement. It arrives as a string of small, odd sightings, jotted down by someone sitting in the shade with nothing better to do than look. The poem is seven three-line stanzas, each a separate glimpse. Together they make a spring that is warmer, stranger and less sentimental than the greeting-card version.
The first stanza sets the method. The speaker closes one eye, then the other, a child's trick that makes the view jump sideways. It is a small joke, but it also works as a statement of intent: the poem will look at the season from slightly different angles. After that the "I" almost disappears, and the rest is made of whatever the eyes land on.
What they land on is not always pretty. The "vicious groundhog fight" ends with a victor who "stands still & lets the flies / land on his face." The violence gives way to stillness, and the winner looks less triumphant than patient, as if warmth were something to be endured. The flies are a plain sign that the weather has turned. The speaker, who has been sitting quietly himself, may be a quiet echo of the groundhog, though the poem never says so.
The language is playful where you least expect it. "Phoebeing" turns the name of a bird into a verb. The phoebe is named for its call, so the word is already an imitation of sound, and the "-ing" makes the repeated song sound like a whole activity, the way we say "raining." Then comes the comic touch: "even the pants on the line / seem to get the rhythm." Laundry swaying on a line joins the bird's beat. The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, so its rhythm comes from this kind of noticing. Lines are short, dashes make pauses, and the casual ampersands give the page the feel of a field notebook.
Stanza four plays a neat trick on the reader. "Fur in the air—" sounds like the leftovers of the groundhog fight, until the next line reveals "the cattails / are shedding." Animal and plant swap vocabulary, and "shedding" reminds us that spring begins with loss as much as growth. The dead elm is "half-naked," a human word that is funny and a little tender. The only explicit simile in the poem comes next: "As slow as spring." The syntax holds back its subject, the "fox squirrel's tail," until the very last line, so the sentence itself moves slowly. The long, soft vowels and the repeated s sounds slow it further.
Then a shadow crosses the scene. The vulture's shadow "travels four times farther— / up & down each tree." Judging by the image, the bird passes overhead and its shadow ripples up the trunks and down again. The oddly precise "four times" sounds like a naturalist's measurement, but it also makes the shadow quick where the squirrel's tail is slow. Together with the dead elm, the vulture brings death quietly into the picture. It isn't a villain here, only another part of the season.
The final stanza changes the tense and the place. "This morning" looks back, indoors, to a forsythia that "bloomed" in a vase. After the fighting, shedding and shadows, something finally flowers, and the poem says so in the plainest possible verb. The bloom is small and domestic, a cut branch on a table, and that suits the poem's refusal to make spring grand.
The poem matters because it teaches a way of paying attention. It doesn't tell us what spring means. It lets one warm day contain a fight, some fluff, a slow tail, a passing shadow and a flower, and it trusts the reader to feel how these belong together. Its fragmentary form fits that idea, since spring here is many small events happening at once. Closing one eye and then the other, the speaker sees that no single view is enough.