Too Much Of A Good Thing - Analysis

Weather as a threat, not a blessing

The poem’s central claim is that what looks like good weather can be a quiet disaster when you live downstream of it. The title, Too Much of a Good Thing, turns the usual praise of sun and warmth into a warning: snow melting too soon means the year’s water arrives all at once and then vanishes when it’s needed. The speaker watches the Río Grande daily and notices the water level is high, but the tone isn’t relieved. It’s wary, practical, the voice of someone who knows the calendar of a river and the costs of getting that calendar wrong.

The poem’s anxiety is specific: What happens / when I need to irrigate pastures / in summer / and there is no water? That plain question holds the whole piece together. Early melt isn’t abundance; it’s a mis-timed payout. The river is “all flowing down river,” already leaving, already out of the speaker’s hands.

From water scarcity to moral scarcity

As the poem moves from observation into consequence, it shows how drought dries up more than fields. Farmers get edgy and begin cursing neighbors for using too much water. The resource problem becomes a relationship problem: scarcity makes suspicion feel reasonable. The poem doesn’t romanticize rural life; it shows how quickly community can shrink into grievance when survival is on the line.

Even the list of impacts is clipped and accumulating: Crops stunted, only one alfalfa cutting / instead of three, no feed for cows, then no money. The repetition of no turns economics into a kind of suffocation. Water disappears, then forage, then cash, then options.

Rifle shots in the “cold morning air”

The poem’s darkest turn arrives as memory: like it happened a few years ago, Mr. Gonzales goes out, rifle shots blister / cold morning air, and his cattle are falling in snow, / dead. The shock here is twofold. First, the violence is not against an enemy but against what sustains a household; the rifle becomes an instrument of mercy, desperation, or both. Second, the cattle die in snow—an image that should mean protection, stored moisture, future runoff. Instead snow becomes a stage for loss, as if the season itself is betraying its purpose.

This is the poem’s key contradiction: the landscape still looks wintry, but the year is already failing. The “cold morning air” is intact, yet the future water has already fled. The poem makes climate feel like a moral whiplash—conditions that appear normal while the underlying system collapses.

The mall’s sunshine and the cost of not knowing

When the speaker shifts to Coronado Center, biggest shopping mall / in New Mexico, the poem exposes a second kind of drought: a shortage of attention. Two suntanned ladies praise our wonderful weather, and the speaker’s response is restrained but loaded. He doesn’t argue; he gives a glance, throws his gloves / on the counter, and wonders what a farmer’s wife would tell them. The gloves matter because they carry the outside world into the fluorescent inside: they’re a small, physical reminder that the speaker has been living in the weather the women treat as a pleasant backdrop.

The tone here sharpens into a quiet anger—not loud enough to confront strangers, but pointed enough to imagine another voice. The farmer’s wife becomes a figure for lived knowledge, someone who would translate “wonderful” into lost cuttings, dead cattle, and a household’s private panic.

A hard question the poem leaves hanging

Is the problem the weather itself, or the ease with which comfort can erase other people’s emergency? The poem places rifle shots and mall small talk in the same frame and refuses to smooth over the gap. By ending on what the speaker wonder[s], it suggests that the real danger of too much of a good thing is not only early melt, but the culture of praise that lets a disaster keep happening in plain sight.