"Lotic" is a word from the science of fresh water. It describes things that belong to moving water, such as rivers and streams, as opposed to still ponds and lakes. Dave Bonta puts that cool, technical word above a poem of only five lines, and the contrast matters. The title sounds like a field guide, but the poem is a confession of belonging. The speaker does not stand on the bank and study the river. He says he and the river are on the same side.
The first stanza makes that claim in its first line: "the river and I ally." Using "ally" as a verb is unusual, and it gives the friendship a political, almost military edge. An alliance has terms, and the terms come in the next line: "on a one-way creed." A creed is something you believe, and the river's belief is obvious, since water only goes downstream. The speaker agrees to the same rule, and the rule is time. We cannot flow back to the source, to being younger, or to the moment before a decision. The word "creed" turns this fact into a kind of faith, as if accepting irreversibility were a choice and not a sentence passed on us. The line break after "ally" lets the word hang for a second before its purpose arrives, a small pause before the commitment.
The second stanza drops the "I" completely. Three lines begin with the same participle: "being a body / being water / being mother to ice." Nobody is named as the one who is being, and the grammar lets river and speaker blur together. The repeated "being" also keeps the poem in a permanent present. These are ongoing states, with no tidy past or future tense, and they move down the page the way a current moves. The series is a careful progression. "A body" is solid and separate, and it could belong to either of them. "Water" dissolves that boundary, and it is a reminder that a human body is largely made of the stuff, so the alliance is physical as well as emotional. Then "mother to ice" bends the sequence in a startling direction.
That last line is the poem's real turn. Ice is what flowing water becomes when it stops. A river freezes and stillness is born from motion. Calling the water its "mother" gives that stillness a tender, family feeling instead of a threatening one. Judging by the imagery, ice may suggest endings, cold, or even death, and the poem presents all of these as something we give birth to, something that comes out of living and moving. The one-way creed leads somewhere, and here it leads to a hush. There is also a quiet tension in the word "mother." It suggests lineage and continuation, which sits oddly beside the idea of a path with no return, and the poem leaves that tension unresolved.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and the lines are short, so the poem is free verse that never gets a full stop. It ends on "ice" with no period, as though the current simply continues past the page. The vowels do quiet work, though. The long "i" of "I" and "ally" returns at the very end in "ice," so the poem begins with the self and finishes on the self's frozen offspring. The long "e" in "creed" and in each "being" gives the middle of the poem a drawn-out, steady hum. The line lengths also shift slightly. The last line, "being mother to ice," is the longest of the five, and it lengthens just as the idea grows most surprising.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does without announcing it. It could have been a nature poem in which a person admires a river. It makes the person a participant instead, bound by the same law as the water and made of the same material. In an age when we are often told to "protect" nature as if it were somewhere else, the poem quietly removes the gap between "I" and "river." It is short enough to read in seconds, but the last line makes you pause, and then you want to go back to the first.