Dave Bonta's "Correspondence" begins with a question, and the poem never quite answers it. "How did they do it, those long-distance lovers of old, waiting months for a letter to make its way by sea?" The speaker looks back with amazement at a kind of love that had to survive on delay. Instead of explaining how it was done, the poem shows what a letter felt like once it arrived, and in doing so suggests that the waiting and the reading were two halves of one experience.
The form helps with this. The poem is a single short stanza of free verse, with no rhyme and no regular beat. The lines are short and often break in the middle of a thought. The very first break splits the compound "long- / distance", so the word itself is stretched across two lines, and "waiting / months" holds the reader on the verb before giving the time span. The sentence about the sea crosses three lines before it lands on "sea," as though the sentence were making the voyage too. Sound quietly supports the meaning. The opening is full of l and m sounds ("long," "lovers," "old," "letter," "months," "make"), a soft, humming run of consonants that suits longing.
Then the tone changes. The question gives way to an exclamation: "And when it did, oh the slow / parsing of its every word!" "Parsing" is a schoolroom word, the grammar-lesson habit of taking a sentence apart to see how it works. Here it is applied to love. The lovers read the way a student reads a hard text, because every word has to carry months of absence. The phrase "oh the slow" is also a small joke, since the speaker's excitement is about slowness.
The last five lines drop the grammar of explanation and work through two images. Neither sentence has a main verb, so they read like objects held up to the light. First, "Onion-skin paper / like a bed of salt." Onion-skin is a very thin, nearly see-through paper, and the comparison gives it a white, dry, crystalline look. Salt also fits the sea crossing, which the poem has just mentioned, as though the ocean had left its mark on the page. And "bed" is an odd, intimate word to meet in a poem about lovers kept apart. My own reading is that a bed of salt is also a place where nothing grows, which makes the page feel bare and a little melancholy before anyone has written on it.
That is why the second image works so well: "Cursive writing / like Jonah's gourd vine, / the work of a single night." In the Book of Jonah, a plant springs up overnight to shade the prophet and withers soon after. The handwriting is the vine, curling and looping across the blank, salty page. This gives the poem its central tension. The letter takes months to arrive, but the image of its writing is one of sudden growth, something made in a night. The lovers wait through a long time for something that, in another sense, is delicate and quick. A vine that grows overnight can also die overnight, and the allusion hints at how fragile this kind of shelter is, though the poem leaves that thought unspoken.
The title carries a double meaning. "Correspondence" means letters, but it also means likeness, one thing answering to another. The poem works exactly this way, matching paper to salt and handwriting to a plant. It corresponds in both senses.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into eleven lines without lecturing. It never mentions email or instant messages, yet the phrase "those long-distance lovers of old" quietly sets them against our own habits of instant reply. The poem does not say that slowness was better. It makes us look closely at paper and ink, and leaves us wondering what we skip over when words arrive too quickly to be parsed.