Dave Bonta's «Mayapple» begins with a walker who wants to disappear: "I'm trying to get lost / somewhere south along the mountain." What he finds is a crowd. Pushing through the fox grapes, he comes upon a colony of mayapples, and the poem turns from a stroll into a meditation on what it means to act, to endure, and to be spared.
The poem's engine is a clash of vocabularies. The plants are "an insurgent sea," their roots have "yielded a new / weapon against cancer," their patch is an "encampment," and the speaker, in the poem's boldest move, compares himself to "that line of tanks / at the Gate of Heavenly Peace." The Beijing name for Tiananmen Square points to the famous image of tanks halted in a standoff, though the poem never explains it, and the reader has to supply the history. What makes the comparison interesting is where it puts the speaker. He is not the lone figure standing up to the machines. He is the machine, "unable to go farther without / crushing one or two." The hiker is the force that could do harm, and the mayapples are the fragile crowd. His power shows only in his restraint.
That restraint answers the question he asks just before it: "We who eulogize private virtue / & small acts of kindness, / have we forgotten the glory / of the grand gesture?" The question sounds rhetorical, but the poem complicates it. The only gesture on offer is the speaker's stopping, which is small and private, yet he describes it in the language of a political standoff. The scale keeps slipping between a forest floor and a city square, and the poem seems to enjoy the slippage without fully trusting it.
Then the plants themselves undercut the heroic talk. Their "parasols make a brave show," but the flowers "keep their faces down," a nice detail of shyness behind the display. The second half of the poem is built on a refrain of hedges: fruit "that may or may not be digestible," flowers "that may or may not self-pollinate," insects "that may or may not visit." The repetition works like a shrug. The facts are stated in the flat voice of a field guide, and that voice drains the grandeur from the military metaphors. The Latin binomial under the title, *Podophyllum peltatum*, sets up this clinical register before the poem begins.
The ending is where the two registers collide. The mayapples offer "neither nectar nor desirable pollen," so they "seem to persist because a few bees bumble / & forget where they are." Survival here is not courage or strategy. It is a lucky lapse of attention. The ending also rhymes with the opening in meaning if not in sound. The speaker wanted to get lost, and the bees' forgetting where they are is what keeps the colony alive. Being lost, the poem hints, can be productive as well as aimless.
The form is plain to match. There is no rhyme, and the poem runs in quatrains of loose, conversational lines. The sentences ignore the stanza breaks, spilling over them at "a new / weapon," at "I stand / as immobile," and at "if only for a few— / fruit that." The effect is of thought arriving a little ahead of its container, which suits a poem about things that don't stay in their assigned sizes. The ampersands, which replace "and" throughout, give the page a hurried, jotted look, like notes made on the trail. Even the stanza endings feel unsettled: the first stops short on a colon, just as the speaker stops short.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to settle on a moral. It raises the idea of the grand gesture, tests it against a patch of woodland plants, and lets accident, hedging and bumbling insects have the last word. A reader may leave unsure whether the speaker's pause counts as heroism, or whether nothing here is heroic at all and the plants simply happen to live. That uncertainty feels honest, and it makes a small walk in the woods carry real weight.