The question that opens Dave Bonta's "Notes" sounds like a joke about stationery, but it has a hook in it. To "take" notes is to write them down, and to "take" something is also to put up with it. How many notes to self can you take, meaning how many can you bear? The poem spends its remaining lines answering, and the answer ends up on someone's arm.
The first stanza sets the scene in four clipped moves. There is a road "nobody drives for pleasure," a radio dial scanned for "something / sung in drawl," and then the command "Get out & walk." The road line is a fragment, as if jotted down rather than composed, and the poem keeps this notebook manner throughout. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and ampersands stand in for "and," the shorthand of someone writing fast. The only echo is a faint one. In many accents "drawl" and "walk" share a broad vowel, so the stanza's last lines lean on each other without ever chiming. The movement is also a physical one, from sitting in a car and receiving sound through a speaker to standing on your own feet.
The second stanza begins with something that sounds like wisdom: "The older you get, the fewer options / still tempt you." The examples that follow are strange, though. They come as pairs, eye versus ear and fountain versus jar, and in each pair the two options are near twins. Both eye and ear are membranes, and both fountain and jar hold coins. Bonta seems to suggest that the temptations left to an older person are fine distinctions, not grand choices. The phrase "wet membranes through which / light enters our heads" makes the eye oddly bodily, almost unpleasant, against the taut, dry "eardrum," a word with a musical instrument already inside it. Coins thrown in a fountain are given up for a wish, while coins in a jar are kept. Judging by the imagery, the jar might even be a busker's, though the poem doesn't say so.
Then hearing stops being enough. "If you want to feel every note," the poem says, you need a desert, and the scale lurches from a desert "small as a banjo head" to one "unreachable as the moon." The banjo head is a stretched skin, which links it back to the eardrum, and the banjo itself fits the twang of that drawl on the radio. A few lines later comes "the parchment of your arm," another stretched skin. Eardrum, drum head, parchment and arm form a chain of surfaces that receive marks and vibrations. A desert, in this logic, is a blank page.
That chain makes the tattoo shop feel inevitable instead of random. The tattooist is asked to "take dictation," so the artist becomes a scribe and the needle a pen. "Notes" now carries three meanings at once: things written down, musical tones, and sensations felt in the body. The opening question is answered literally, since you can take as many notes as your skin will hold, and "take" here includes the pain. The jotted private reminder has become permanent and public.
The ending refuses to defend any of this. "Don't try to explain. / This isn't that kind of trip." After the long, winding sentence about senses and deserts, the lines shorten into plain, almost curt statements, like an exhale. "Trip" brings back the road from the opening, but it also hints at a journey of a stranger kind. The poem is declining to justify itself as well as its speaker.
What makes "Notes" worth reading is that it enacts its own idea. It is built from jotted fragments, and it argues that real attention costs something physical, that to feel a note you must put your body in its path. It does this in a dry, wry, second-person voice that never turns sentimental. It also leaves the central leap, from radio dial to tattoo needle, for the reader to make, which is perhaps what the final instruction means. Some experiences are not meant to be explained.