The title is a joke before the poem begins: a mouthful of Greek that dresses the fear of Friday the 13th in clinical robes. Dave Bonta then undercuts the pomp. The opening sounds like a footnote from a history essay, noting that the "first documented reference" already calls the superstition "ancient." But the poem doesn't go on to explain the fear. It asks what the ancients would actually have done, and the answer is that they would have paid attention.
That attention is the poem's real subject. The ancients, it says, had "much more complex methods for detecting / an inauspicious day," and the word itself holds a quiet clue, since "auspice" comes from the Latin for watching birds. Bonta's examples are birds too. Three crows "skimmed low & landed in the field / to reunite with their shadows," a lovely image in which black birds meet their own black doubles on the ground. Then comes wild columbine "thrusting its red lanterns where / they don't belong." Red lanterns suggest warning lights, and the flowers are a weed out of place, a small irregularity in the ordinary. These omens are local, specific and seen with the eyes, and the repeated "might've" keeps the speaker modest. He is imagining how a day could be read, not claiming to know.
The poem turns on a sharp contrast: "Our ancestors preferred / hot jets of revelation to the patient / & dispassionate sifting of evidence." Heat is set against patience, and a sudden flash of certainty against slow looking. Then the poem implicates the reader: "you & I are the eventual result." Our version of the old wisdom is a calendar date and some building habits, "missing 13th floors" and, in the same breath, "boardrooms full of Judases." The joke has two edges. We skip the unlucky number, yet we seat betrayers at the table. (Judas is often called the thirteenth guest at the Last Supper, which links the two images.) The real danger, the line implies, is not on the calendar.
Formally, the poem is a single stanza of twenty-five unrhymed lines with no regular meter. It reads like one long, wry sentence of thought, and its authority comes from tone rather than music. The enjambments are careful. "Where" dangles at the end of a line, and "they don't belong" begins the next, so the phrase is itself a little out of place. The ampersands give the page a quick, note-taking look and keep the voice casual even when it is being cutting.
The hinge comes with the deadpan statistic that "Ten million Americans won't get / out of bed today because / nothing bad can happen as long / as your eyes stay closed." The figure is the poem's own claim, and its comic logic is tidy and absurd. But the line also states the poem's argument in reverse. Superstition here is a refusal to look, while the crows and columbine belong to someone whose eyes are open.
The last three lines show the speaker doing the looking. "In an otherwise empty morning sky" gives us the moon, "dead" and shaped like a "fish-belly of a C." The pale underside of a dead fish is an unsettling comparison, and a thin morning crescent may well resemble a C, though that is an inference from the imagery. The letter also sounds like "sea," which suits the fish, and like "see," which suits the poem. Then the final question, "what can possibly begin with" that C, plays on the fact that "crows" and "columbine" have already appeared in the poem. The question is half rhetorical, and it leaves open whether the speaker is mocking omens or has caught himself reading one.
That open ending makes the poem more than a debunking. It is funny about modern fear, but it never sneers at the old habit of reading the world. What it mocks is the shortcut, the lazy dread attached to a date. It treats skepticism and attention as allies, since looking carefully at crows and flowers and sky is not credulous at all. For a reader, the poem is a small lesson in the difference between being afraid of a day and actually watching it.