Dave Bonta opens with a raised glass: "Here's to the skunk cabbage, / first plant to raise a toast to spring." The joke is that the plant is itself doing the toasting, and it has to do so in awful conditions, melting "a hole / right through the ice." From there the poem moves from celebration to something stranger and more thoughtful. It follows the plant through a whole season and argues, without ever stating it outright, that the beginning of spring is tangled up with decay.
The most striking move comes in the middle. The skunk cabbage keeps its own "hothouse" at "22 degrees Celsius / for weeks on end," and the precise figure sounds almost like a thermostat setting. The heat is there to draw the "earliest flies & beetles," whose "springtime fancy / turns to putrefaction." That phrase recalls the old saying about spring and a young man's fancy turning to love. The poem swaps romance for "gut piles, / winter-killed deer, & in the swamp // a leathery curl of old meat." The list is blunt and physical, and the word "leathery" lets you feel the texture. Then comes the sharpest joke: the plant's heat and smell are something "the real thing can rarely match— / pornography for insects." The line is comic and a little shocking. It also fits the poem's logic, since "pollination is consummated" a few lines later keeps the erotic vocabulary going. The plant fakes a corpse so well that it beats the genuine article, and the insects, fooled and delighted, do its work for it.
The poem's best image is probably "Half monk, half cobra." It describes the plant's hooded shape (the poem later names the spadix inside it), and it also holds two opposite ideas. The monk suggests solitude and patience, and the cobra suggests danger and a hint of menace. The very next phrase, "it shares its solitude," keeps the monkish note alive, so the plant seems both a hermit and a seducer at once.
The poem's structure supports this. It is written in free verse with no rhyme, in unbroken two-line stanzas. Almost every sentence spills over the stanza break, so the poem keeps tipping forward, much as the plant pushes upward through the ice. The couplets also give a quiet, patient rhythm, like a slow count of days. The ampersands lend a casual, notebook feel, and the Latin name beneath the title, *Symplocarpus foetidus*, makes the poem look at first like a field guide entry. The plant's own Latin name means "stinking," so the label has a joke in it too. The language mixes registers on purpose: "Celsius" and "pollination" sit beside "putrefaction" and "pungent mud," as if a scientist and a bar-room speechmaker were sharing the same page.
After the loud, smelly middle, the final third slows down. The leaves finally appear, "huge sails with yellow stitching," a surprisingly tidy and homely image, as though the swamp had produced something sewn by hand. The green "stays fresh / long into the summer," and the "dark berries / swell on the spadix." Then the poem turns inward and downward: "the roots tighten their grip / on the pungent mud, // the whole plant inching / into the earth." The last verb, "inching," is small and slow, and it ends the poem on a gentle descent, with none of the toast's bravado. The plant that began by melting its way up into the cold ends by sinking back into the ground that fed it.
That ending may be the poem's real point. The skunk cabbage is not pretty, and the poem never pretends it is. It stays vivid because it is honest about what living things do, which is to use heat, smell, trickery and decay to keep going. By choosing a plant most people would walk past holding their noses, Bonta makes a case for noticing the overlooked and for finding a kind of grandeur in the stubborn, ugly start of the year. The poem makes you laugh first, and then it leaves you looking at the mud with more respect.