Dave Bonta's poem has no title, only a row of asterisks, and the gesture fits. It reads less like a finished statement than a page from a notebook, three small entries about being outdoors and paying attention. Its central idea only comes into focus gradually: everything in this landscape, from the moon to a butterfly, is moved by forces it cannot see, and the speaker is no exception.
The first stanza sets the terms. "I sweep snow off my chair" is the only moment of real action by the speaker, and it is a quietly hopeful one, since you clear a chair only if you plan to sit and wait. What arrives is the crescent moon "appearing & disappearing behind the clouds," a phrase that turns visibility into a rhythm of coming and going. The stanza ends on a fragment with no "I" in it: "Trees creaking in the dark." The speaker has stopped being the subject and become an ear, and the grammar shows it.
The second stanza develops this with colour. The fog is "gray against the snow," and the juncos are "slate-colored," so the birds nearly dissolve into the weather around them. They are heard but not seen, calling "back & forth," and the poem lets their call stand alone on its line: "Where are you?" Whether that is the birds' real meaning or the speaker's projection, the poem leaves open. Fog has taken away sight, and the birds can only keep each other located by sound. The loneliness in the line is mild, almost companionable, because someone is always answering. Then, in a short line, "A wind comes up," and the stanza ends without telling us whether the fog lifts. The wind is simply the next thing that happens.
The third stanza jumps ahead in time, and the poem's quiet leap is worth noticing. The snow has gone, and so have the daffodils of April. Goldenrod now sways where they were, "a more worldly yellow." The word "worldly" is the most interpretive in the poem. It suggests that spring's yellow was fresh and untried, while late summer's is knowing and a little weathered. The echo of "Where" from the juncos' question is probably deliberate. The daffodils' absence seems to be the answer to a question nobody asked aloud. Notice too that "bloomed" is the only past tense in the poem. Everything else happens now, so the daffodils are the one thing it remembers.
The final image brings the wind back in an enormous form: "The distant hurricane / makes a roosting monarch flap its wings." The hurricane is far away, yet its effect reaches a single insect resting on a plant. The line is a gentle version of the idea that distant events travel into small lives, and it fits the pattern of the whole poem. The moon is hidden by clouds, the trees creak in an unseen wind, and the butterfly is stirred by a storm it cannot see. Nothing here acts alone, and the speaker, who first sat quietly in a swept chair, belongs to the same web of influence.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme or regular metre. Lines swell and shrink according to what is being noticed, and the stanzas run four, five and five lines. The punctuation is spare. The ampersands, used twice, give the writing a jotted, hurried look, and the single dash after "goldenrod sways" is a small pause before the poem's one judgment. Many lines are verbless fragments such as "Thick fog at dawn," which makes the poem feel like seeing rather than describing. Soft, low sounds recur, as in "creaking," "gray," "slate" and "call," and they keep the mood hushed.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts small things. It never announces a theme about change or connection. It lets a creaking tree, a bird call and a flapping wing do that work, and it leaves us to feel the pull of "Where are you?" without being told whom it addresses. The lasting effect is a way of paying attention: sit still, brush off the snow, and see what answers.