A discarded water bottle opens Dave Bonta's "Ramifications," and the joke is a sharp one. The romantic image is the message in a bottle, but here the river sends the sea only a brand name, "Aquafina," left alone on its own line like a label. Packaged water goes back to water. That first tercet sets the tone for the whole piece: attentive, dry, amused, and not inclined to lecture.
What holds the eight unrhymed tercets together is a way of seeing. Look at what the poem looks at: the veins in a rabbit's ears lit by sunrise, the creases of a palm, the "red-threaded net" of a moccasin flower, the pale tracery under a log's bark. Nearly everything is a branching pattern. The title, which means both a branching-out and a chain of consequences, invites us to read them as one pattern. Rivers split into tributaries, trees into twigs, hands into lines. The poem never says so. It lets repetition make the argument.
The framing is clever. The second stanza says that once the leaves come out, the tree's shadow "no longer / resembles a tree." This is a small paradox, since a full canopy breaks into dappled coins of light while a bare tree casts a clean drawing of itself. The last stanza answers it. The tide leaves a "tree-shaped print / in the sand," and the dash before "its shining trunk" works like a curtain pulled back, so that the pattern arrives before we are told what it resembles. Water, which began the poem carrying litter, ends it drawing a tree. In a sense the sea writes back.
The middle stanzas turn toward the body and toward time. "A second set of lines / in the palm I rested on" suggests leaf veins pressed into skin. Then the poem swerves into fortune-telling: "more leaves in my future." Leaves might mean growth or more autumns, and the poem leaves both open. Next comes the cicada: "Seventeen times sadder / than fallen cherry blossoms." Cherry blossoms are the classic emblem of fleeting beauty in Japanese poetry, and periodical cicadas can spend seventeen years underground for one short season in the air. The number may also nod to the seventeen syllables of a traditional haiku, though that is my inference. Measuring sadness by multiplication is funny, and because the wings really are all that remains, it is also true.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter. The line breaks do the work. "No longer" hangs at a line end before "resembles a tree" delivers its surprise. "Sunrise catches" makes the sun sound like a hunter or a photographer before the rabbit is named, and then the last line shrinks to a fragment, "the veins in its ears," like a zoom. Sound adds texture: the hissing of "Seventeen times sadder," the rocking "Bobbing in the wind," the clipped stack of "white fishnet hose." That last image is the funniest. Fine pale tracks under peeled bark become stockings, and the past tense of "was wearing" makes the log seem caught half-dressed. Judging by the image, insects probably made those tracks, though the poem doesn't say. Nets keep recurring, in "catches," "net" and "fishnet," a quiet motif of things caught in mesh, much like the poet's own net of attention.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses to separate the human from the natural. A branded bottle, a palm, a stocking and a tree sit side by side without hierarchy, and none is made to preach. It takes about a minute to read, yet it trains the reader in what it describes. Once you've noticed the veins in a rabbit's ear, you start finding them everywhere.