A mother is supposed to be warm. Dave Bonta's "Living in Analog" opens by refusing that expectation: "The cold is a mother / as generous as the space / between the stars." The comparison is oddly tender. The cold gives, and what the speaker gives back is "my discontent & my distance." The poem that follows is an attempt to work out where real warmth might come from, and its answer is surprising.
The first stanza is about versions of the self left behind. The speaker imagines "all those older & more restless selves" still travelling outward "at the speed of light." The image works because of the title. Analog photography, with its Polaroids and single-lens reflex cameras, catches light and fixes it on a surface, and light from the past really does keep travelling. Each photograph is a small proof that a former self has been sent off into the dark, like old starlight. The grin the speaker gave those cameras was a performance: "inside / I was wincing." The line break leaves "inside" stranded at the end of its line, which suits a feeling hidden behind a smile. Then comes the one-word sentence "Cold." It is both a temperature and a mood, and the stanza stops there as if the speaker had run out of things to say.
The second stanza answers that stillness with a long, unspooling sentence, and the change in pace is part of the meaning. Learning to knit at seven is the first defence against the cold, and the sounds of the list are soft and woolly: "scarves / & sweaters, socks & gloves." But the list drifts. After garments come "maps / & pastures & that long deep lake / I later loved." Knitting turns into landscape, as if the stitches were a way of making a world one could live in. The slow vowels of "long deep lake" make it feel like a place the speaker still holds on to.
Then the speaker turns into a sea creature. "No mere mermaid" rejects the fairy-tale version of someone who lives between two worlds. What replaces it is rougher: "scars from ships' propellers / & orca attacks, the stubborn barnacles." Judging by the imagery, the speaker is closer to some large, battered marine animal, and the hard consonants of "stubborn barnacles" suit the damage. These are the marks of having travelled and survived rather than of having been admired.
The last image is the strangest and the best. On land the speaker is "a sycamore, rich / in baubles no one wanted." A sycamore does hang round seed balls like ornaments, so "baubles" is exact, and it is rueful too, since the tree is loaded with gifts nobody asked for. Sycamores also shed their bark in patches. The speaker is "struggling to peel down / to a warmer skin."
That last line quietly reverses the knitting. Wool adds layers, and the sycamore removes them. The poem suggests that the warmth the speaker wants may not come from adding scarves, adventures or even the grinning self in the photograph. It may come from stripping those away. The word "struggling" keeps this from sounding like a tidy lesson, and the poem ends on the effort rather than the arrival.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular beat. Its music comes from enjambment, alliteration ("mere mermaid") and the ampersands, which give the voice a casual, quick-handed feel. That plainness helps the big images, stars, orcas and a peeling tree, seem to belong to one person's ordinary speech.
The poem is significant for how much it fits into twenty-three lines. It joins cosmic distance to a child's knitting needles, and it treats identity as something shed as much as built. A student reading it can see how images, rather than explanations, carry the argument, and how a poem about being cold can leave a reader warmed.