Somebody has let a fish out of the stream, and the speaker of Dave Bonta's "Trout Lily" wants to know how. The question is a joke, and it is also the poem's whole method. A trout lily is a wildflower, and the poem takes its odd name literally, as if the plant were a trout that had slipped its element and ended up on land. The central idea is that a name can be a dormant metaphor, and a poet can wake it up just by looking closely enough to see why the name fits.
The poem's construction is simple and neat. It is one question followed by one long, breathless sentence of evidence. The question takes four lines ("How did / this trout / escape / the stream?"). The answer begins "It's not only," which sounds like someone building a case and piling up proof. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Instead the lines are very short, mostly two or three beats, so the poem moves down the page in small, quick pieces. That suits a poem about a leaping fish, since the eye keeps catching on tiny drops and turns. A reader can almost hear the poem skipping like a stone across the surface of the sentence.
The line breaks do some of the most interesting work. Twice Bonta splits a compound word across a line: "salmon- / colored" and "sun- / bright." The reader's eye has to jump the gap, and the jump acts out what the words describe. "Leap" gets a line to itself, and so does "escape," so each word holds still for a moment, like a fish at the top of its arc. The ampersands ("& mottled," "& arc," "& the way it falls") add to the effect. They are quick, informal joins that keep the sentence from slowing down.
The imagery is built on a double vision. The leaves are "mottled" and "glossy as fins," and the comparison does real work: the speckled, slick-looking foliage is described exactly as one might describe the flank of a fish. Then comes the poem's most striking word, "ichthyomorphic," meaning fish-shaped. It is the longest word in the poem and a deliberately scientific one, and it echoes the Latin name, *Erythronium americanum*, printed beneath the title. The effect is comic, because such a grand word is applied to a small plant, but it also shows the speaker as a careful observer, someone who can use the botanist's vocabulary and the child's sense of wonder in the same breath. The "salmon- / colored stem" brings in a second fish and a second color. The stem does not simply stand; it makes a "leap / & arc," so a stationary plant becomes a body in motion.
The ending is the best moment. The plant "falls" with "a sun- / bright splash." The flower is never named, but judging by the imagery, the splash is the bloom itself, which in this species is yellow and hangs downward. A yellow flower becomes a flash of sunlight on disturbed water, and the poem finishes on a burst of sound as well as color. The "s" sounds of "salmon," "stem's," "sun," and "splash" run through the second half like spray, while "leaves" and "leap" share an opening letter and so are linked as well. The fish never actually reappears, and it doesn't have to. The splash is where the poem lands.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In sixteen short lines it takes a name most of us would pass over and shows it to be a small act of imagination, made by someone who once saw a fish in a leaf. The poem doesn't lecture about nature or reach for grand emotions. It lets playfulness do the persuading. After reading it, a reader is likely to look at plants a little differently, and to suspect that many other names in the natural world are metaphors waiting to leap again.