Pop songs like their love young, breathless and certain, and Dave Bonta's poem admits as much with a shrug: love after 50 "doesn't make the pop charts." The reason comes in one flat sentence, "It's too absurd," and the remaining lines try to show what that word means. The poem never defines love directly. There is no partner, no kiss, no anniversary. Instead it builds its case from four small physical experiences, each introduced by the same hinge, "Absurd as." Its central idea is that late love is absurd in the way many of the best things are: illogical, a little ridiculous, hard to explain, and entirely worth having.
The word "absurd" works in two directions. In the opening lines it sounds like a put-down, the sneer of a world that finds middle-aged romance faintly embarrassing. By the end it has become a compliment, because everything the poem compares love to is something we enjoy without being able to justify. Pouring hot coffee over ice cubes is a slightly silly thing to do, and the cubes end up "shedding their sharp edges." Read as a picture of love, that suggests people softening with age. The verb "settling" has a cozy, lived-in sound, as if the cubes were getting comfortable while they melted. The image is gentle, but it also admits that something is lost.
The next two images drift toward mortality, though the poem never says so. Breath on a cold morning is a "day-time ghost," and the phrase turns the usual order upside down, since ghosts belong to night. Breath is life made briefly visible and about to vanish. Judging by the imagery, a reader at 50 or older might hear in it a quiet awareness that time is limited, which makes the feeling sharper. Then comes the poem's only question: "why should mere dirt outdo all other odors?" Up to this point the poem has been a list. Here it sounds like a person standing in a garden, puzzled and delighted. The word "mere" does the work. Dirt is humble, and the smell of rain on it beats perfume anyway. The long *o* sounds in "outdo all other odors" make the line pleasantly round to say aloud, as though the mouth were savoring it.
The final comparison is the longest and the least conventionally pretty. It gives us "a wobbly bench grinder with a corroding belt," a worn-out tool that still does its job. Bonta could have chosen roses or sunsets. A rusting workshop machine is more surprising, and it suits the idea of love that comes with some wear on it. The sparks become a "hair of sparks," which turns a mechanical image into a bodily one, and the poem ends on the "pleasant way they prickle against the skin." A small sting turns into pleasure. After all the distance of smell, sight and sound, this is the first image of touch, so the poem closes on closeness without ever naming it.
The form is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter. The thirteen lines vary in length, and the rhythm follows the argument. The opening is curt: "It's too absurd." Then the sentences stretch, and the grinder image sprawls over four lines, as if the speaker cannot stop adding details. The repeated "Absurd as" works like a chant, but the content keeps changing, so the pattern never goes stale. Sound adds texture too. "Shedding their sharp edges" hisses softly, and "pleasant" and "prickle" echo each other at the end.
The voice is also worth noticing. The poem says "one pours" and "one's breath," never "I" or "you." This impersonal stance keeps the feeling at arm's length and gives the poem a dry, wry tone, which may be the point. It would be easy to write about late love sentimentally or to mock it. This poem does neither. It proves its claim by example instead of arguing it, and it trusts ordinary things (melting ice, cold air, wet soil, a noisy machine) to carry what a love song would simply declare. That trust is what makes it significant. It gives a subject that popular culture mostly ignores an honest voice, and it shows how metaphor can say what a direct statement cannot.