Spring arrives in this poem on a roadside, and it is not tidy. Hepatica, one of the first woodland flowers, has just opened above a road bank. Beneath it lies a dead porcupine, with carrion beetles crawling through its quills. Dave Bonta writes the scene without comment or lament, and it is only in the middle that he states his idea, almost casually: "The snow hasn't been gone a week, / but already life & death / seem far apart." The key word is "seem." Everything else in the poem shows how close the two are.
The images are chosen to produce that closeness. The spring azure butterflies "ring / what's left of its mouth," a phrase that makes the ruined face look like a small ceremonial space. The butterflies also ignore the flowers, which sway "in all the colors of the sky, / white & pink & blue." The butterflies are named for a sky color themselves, so they match the blossoms exactly, yet they turn away from them toward the carcass. Beauty here is not safely on the side of the flowers. The mouth is described as "a void spanned by a pair / of yellow rails." Judging by the imagery, the rails are the animal's incisors, and the metaphor turns teeth into something like a small railway bridge over an emptiness. The line break after "pair" leaves a gap in the verse, just as there is a gap in the animal's face.
The form is quiet and conversational. It is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter, in a single unbroken stanza of twenty-four lines and three sentences. The long first sentence runs through heavy enjambment ("where / the hepatica has just come / into bloom"), so the reader is carried along as if walking up the bank and noticing things one at a time. The sounds shift with the subject. "Clamber through the quills" is crowded with hard, scratchy consonants, while "relaxing into the earth" is soft and slow. The ampersands, used throughout in place of "and," give the poem a jotted, field-notebook look. They also join "life & death" and "white & pink & blue" with the same small symbol, as though nothing separates one pairing from another.
The last third turns from the animal to the leaves, and this is where the poem becomes more thoughtful. The old "rusty leaves / that lasted the winter out" are "relaxing into the earth." The verb is gentle and nearly comfortable, so decay sounds like rest. Soon, the poem says, the leaves will be "indecipherable" to "the most ardent follower / of the doctrine of signatures / in search of liverleaf." The doctrine of signatures was the old belief that a plant's shape shows what it can cure. Hepatica's three-lobed leaves were thought to resemble the liver, hence "liverleaf" and the Latin title. The title, then, offers the flower in its formal scientific dress, and the common name appears only near the end, as something people hunt for.
The poem seems to make a small, wry point about reading nature like a text. A person who wants the plant to be a sign, a message with a use, will find that the leaves are melting back into soil and no longer legible. The final lines, "or those who seek respite / from dreams of snakes," add a stranger kind of seeker. The poem seems to allude to some belief about the plant and troubled sleep, but it doesn't explain, and the trailing, unresolved ending leaves a faint unease behind the spring brightness.
The poem is significant for what it declines to do. It does not make the dead porcupine a symbol of sorrow or the flowers a symbol of hope. It sets them next to each other, lets the butterflies make their indifferent choice, and trusts the reader to see that the boundary between living and dying is thinner than the word "far" suggests. It also gently questions the human habit of pulling meaning out of nature. The most memorable thing in the poem is not a lesson but the sight of blue butterflies circling an open mouth beneath a bank of flowers.