A thud against a window is not how most moon poems begin. Dave Bonta's "May moon" starts with a clumsy insect, and the speaker's reason for going outside is small and practical: "to see if / the moon's full yet." Nothing grand is promised. What follows is a few minutes of close attention to one spring night, and the poem suggests that this kind of attention is worth something.
The moon is the first thing the speaker examines, and it is already imperfect: "still flat on one side / but its ring is perfect." The ring is presumably a halo around the moon, and the line sets the unfinished disc against a flawless circle of light. That contrast sets the mood for the whole poem. The speaker doesn't need the full moon. He is happy to look at a moon that is nearly there. The same idea returns in the final stanza: "it's still only May." The June bug has arrived early, the moon is not yet full, and summer has barely begun. The poem is about the pleasure of waiting, of being a little ahead of the season.
The senses carry most of the poem. The "thud" of the June bug is onomatopoeia, a sound you feel before you see it. Then comes smell: the speaker fills his nostrils "again & again / with the scent / of dame's-rocket." The repetition and the ampersand copy the greedy rhythm of sniffing, and the line break after "scent" makes us wait for the flower's name, as if the smell arrives before the word for it. Then comes sight: "stones in the driveway / shine like lost coins." The simile is sharp because it is so ordinary. Moonlight turns gravel into small, forgotten money, and the word "lost" gives the image a faint wistfulness.
The middle of the poem brings in the human world, and the tone shifts. Light "leaks" from the house, a verb that makes the electric glow sound like a spill or a flaw. It is "a brighter shade of pale," which recalls the title of a well-known song, though whether the echo is intended is only an inference. In context the phrase works neatly either way. The house light is brighter than the moon but paler in feeling. The next image extends the idea: "the face of someone texting / in a dark concert hall." Anyone who has been to a concert knows the small, rude glow of a phone among the silent audience. By comparing the lit house to that, the poem casts the night as the performance and the artificial light as the distraction. It is a gentle joke and also a quiet criticism. The spelling "florescent" in the text happens to contain the word for flowering, which is a pleasing accident, whether or not it was meant.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, no capital letters at the start of lines, and no regular metre. Yet the stanzas follow a clear pattern: three lines, then two, alternating through seven stanzas (3-2-3-2-3-2-3). The poem looks casual but is carefully balanced. The short lines also work as pauses. "I go out to see if" hangs on the word "if," so that the line itself shows uncertainty before the next line answers it.
The ending is the most carefully judged part. After the moon, the scent, the coins, and the glaring light, the poem narrows to sound: "in all this long grass / a single cricket." The word "single" matters. One cricket is a promise of many, the first musician in an orchestra that will fill the summer nights. It also continues the concert-hall image from the stanza before, so the poem ends where the real performance is only beginning. The tone is quiet and expectant rather than conclusive.
The poem's significance lies in this modest accuracy. It treats a half-seen moon, a smell, and one insect as enough to write about, and it reminds the reader that the natural world is easiest to notice when we step outside the lit room and put the phone down.