A flood scrubs an island down to bare stone, and Dave Bonta gives the catastrophe one flat sentence. "A hundred-year flood" is a phrase from hydrology, not poetry, and its statistical calm keeps the opening unsentimental. Then comes the turn: "But some piece of root / or stolon must persist." The word "must" matters. The speaker doesn't watch the plant survive. He infers it from the result, three years later, when the rocks are "hidden once again by a crowd / of maple-shaped leaves." Resilience here is deduced, a quiet faith in whatever lies out of sight.
The leaves are "paired like open palms around / the tall flower stalks— / a gesture of acceptance / or of letting go." An open palm can receive or release, and the poem refuses to pick. That suits a place that has lost everything and come back anyway. A few lines later the palms become hands holding out "their offerings," and the poem lifts off. These offerings are "nothing less / than galaxies."
From here the vocabulary swings between astronomy and weather. White stars "storm in the heat of sex," and the flower's parts become "long male streamers, / a sharp-tipped female flare." Streamers suggests party decorations as well as comet tails, and a flare is a flash in the sky. Wandering bees are "pull[ed] ... into their orbit," so pollination is gravity. Sex is not prettified here. It is turbulent and magnetic, and the small plant gets the scale of a cosmos without any apology.
Formally, the poem is a single unbroken block with no stanza breaks and no rhyme. The short lines vary in length, and the sentences do the work that a rhyme scheme would do elsewhere, carrying the reader forward. Enjambment is the main rhythmic tool. "For" is left hanging at the end of a line before "within three years the rocks," and that small suspension mimics the wait for the unseen root to prove itself. Later, "even as / the oldest florets begin to collapse" holds the reader mid-thought, just as the flower holds growth and decay together.
One typographical detail rewards attention. The poem spells out "And" once, early, then switches to ampersands: "& pull wandering bees," "Creation / & destruction," "night & day," "& the dry rattle." The symbol makes the pairs look knotted together on the page. It is hard to read "Creation & destruction" as opposites when the sign between them works like a stitch.
The ending turns on its sound. The oldest florets are "anticipating the inward turn / & the dry rattle," and "rattle" is brittle, a sound of seed and husk. Against it stand the "pubescent buds / at the top of the cluster," a phrase that works twice, since the word can mean downy in botany and adolescent in people. These buds are "brimming with the light / of imminent dawns." "Brimming" brings back the water of the opening flood, and the plural "dawns" refuses to settle on a single sunrise. The poem ends on light, though the rattle has not been denied.
The Latin subtitle, *Tiarella cordifolia*, sits above the poem like a museum label, exact and a little cool. The poem then fills that label with wonder, and the two do not clash. Careful naming, with "stolon," "florets" and the specific shape of the leaves, is what makes the leap to "galaxies" believable.
The poem is also built from nested time scales: a century for the flood, three years for the recovery, and a single flowering stalk in which the whole cycle plays out at once. Destruction does not interrupt creation here but belongs to the same rhythm. A scoured island, an open hand and a cluster of buds say the same thing: loss is part of what the foamflower is.