Buried televisions hissing in the grass make an absurd image, and Dave Bonta plays it completely straight. The party is ordinary: draft beer, plastic cups, hosts with an odd idea for the lawn. But the screens, planted like bulbs and "plugged in," turn the yard into something closer to a sacred site. The speaker calls them "oracles, chthonic & obscure," and the word "chthonic," meaning of the underworld or the earth, makes the joke and the awe arrive together. These machines usually bring us the news, and here they sit underground and speak in noise.
That noise is the poem's real subject. The snow on an unplugged-from-any-channel screen is meaningless and yet seems full of movement, and the poem puts two ways of reading it side by side. A young woman who "appeared to be tripping" starts to weep. The speaker's attempt to console her is a small piece of poetry in its own right: "It's not fighting, I said... It's dancing." We aren't told what she saw, but the line suggests she took the flickering for some kind of violence and he offers a gentler picture. His consolation is a metaphor, a comforting way of seeing.
Then the roles reverse. The woman who is supposedly out of her mind answers with plain physics: "cosmic background radiation & thermal noise." Her lines are the most factual in the poem, since a small share of old television static really was thought to come from the faint radiation left over from the universe's early history. Her conclusion, "Reality is beautiful, you know?", is the only moment of open feeling, and it comes from the person the speaker was trying to calm. The sober one reaches for imagery, the altered one for science, and neither is quite sure who is comforting whom.
The construction supports this deadpan comedy. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The poem is free verse, close to anecdote, told in the flat voice of someone recounting a night out. The ampersands give it a casual, jotted-down look, as if it were written on the back of a napkin. Lines break at natural pauses in speech ("stopped short, stared & began to weep"), and the pace changes with the content: quick short clauses for the woman's reaction, longer breaths for the closing stanza. Sound is used lightly but well. "Screens hissed / their snow from the grass" lets the sibilants imitate the static itself, and the word "snow" quietly makes the lawn a landscape, or a field of dormant seed.
The last stanza widens the frame. The speaker "crouched down for a closer look," a posture somewhere between curiosity and worship, and then the poem steps back to give its date: "It was 1990." The news was "full / of the end of the Cold War" and a new war was "still weeks away." The poem stops here, but its readers know what came next, and the Gulf War became strongly associated with television coverage. In that light the buried screens look prophetic. The oracle's message is easy to miss, and it concerns the way reality would soon be delivered through a screen.
The final toast, "Here's to reality, I said, raising / my disposable cup," is the most layered moment. It echoes the woman's praise of reality but in a different key. Her phrase was sincere; his sounds half-ironic, and the "disposable cup" suggests how easily the real can be thrown away, or turned into something we watch while holding a drink. I read it as unresolved rather than cynical. He does lower himself to look at the noise, and he does drink to what is real. He just can't tell whether the toast is wise or glib.
The poem's significance lies in this refusal to settle. In a few lines it moves from a lawn party to the structure of the universe to the edge of a war, without raising its voice. It also leaves a useful question for any reader: when we look at the static of the world, do we see danger, dance, or just noise, and who gets to decide?