A matchbook is about as small and disposable as an object gets, and Dave Bonta's "Book Match" builds a whole family out of it. The speaker, a former smoker, claims the book match as a brother. The kinship is partly literal, since both come from the world of books, and partly a matter of shared fate. Once a match is torn from its cover, "it couldn't go back." Smoking, the speaker says, made him "an exile from the air," as if each cigarette tore him a little further from the ordinary, breathable world. I take "the son of a writer & a librarian" as the speaker's own claim, not as a biographical fact, but it sets up the central conceit well. A child raised among books would naturally see a book match as a page that has been pulled out and set on fire.
The second stanza is where the humor and the sadness meet. "We both had a tendency to lose our heads" works as a pun, because a match's head is the part that flares, but it also confesses to a certain recklessness in the speaker. Then comes the image of being "skinny as a heron's leg," which is precise and a little comic. The heron's leg is a thin, brittle stalk, and the comparison makes the speaker and the match look equally breakable. The poem then undercuts even that: a book match "isn't even thick enough / to qualify as a match stick." The brother turns out to be a lesser thing than the thing it belongs to. It is almost nothing, and the speaker seems to like it for that.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It moves like someone talking, in plain sentences broken at natural pauses, with an ampersand standing in for "and" in two places, as though even the punctuation were being kept minimal. The stanzas run six lines, then four, then three, then five, so the shape feels unplanned, like a match being struck and burning down at whatever length it happens to. The most important break comes between stanzas three and four. The "minimal page" has room for one word "beginning with a lower-case L," and then the stanza ends. The next one opens "& ending with incandescence." The white space between the L and the blaze acts like the strike itself, a small pause before the flare.
The poem never names that word, which invites guessing. My own inference is "love." It begins with a lower-case l, it can be called both "holy" and "profane," and "love match" is a kind of match, which would explain the apologetic "(forgive me)" for the pun. "Lucifer," an old name for a friction match that also means "light-bearer," is a plausible second candidate. Either way, the word is one that has been struck too many times.
That brings out the poem's deeper idea. The word is "so worn out from overuse / I hesitate now to let it pass my lips." The match can only burn once, but a word can be used endlessly, and that endless use is what wears it down. A match is spent in a single flash, while "love" or "light" gets spent a little each time someone says it. The speaker's quitting smoking in the past tense ("Back when I smoked") sits beside this new reluctance in the present ("I hesitate now"). Both are acts of giving something up, and both leave the speaker standing slightly outside, like the match that cannot go back into its book.
The repetition does quiet work too. "Match" turns up as "book match," "match stick," and "a kind of match," shifting meaning each time, while "word" recurs in the last two stanzas until the reader feels the same fatigue the speaker describes. The poem is small, funny, and self-aware, and that is what makes it significant. It treats a throwaway object as a way of asking how a poet can use the biggest words in the language without burning them out, and its answer is to name them only by circling around them. The word it holds back is the one that stays with the reader.