A valediction is, strictly speaking, a formal farewell, a speech made on the way out the door. Dave Bonta's poem takes that title and quietly takes it apart. Within three lines the speaker admits that no goodbye was said "with our hands," and within five he has corrected himself again: "(And anyway it was / more of a hello.)" The poem seems to be about the end of a relationship, though it never says so outright. What it really explores is how an ending can turn out to be something else, a change of state rather than a disappearance.
The opening image is the strangest and the best. Instead of waving, the two people say goodbye "with naked branches." Judging by the imagery, it is late in the year, and the trees are bare. But the word "naked" also carries a human exposure, as if the farewell happened without any protection, and the branches stand in for the arms that did not wave. The speaker lets the landscape do the emotional work. That detail helps explain the odd claim that this was "more of a hello": a bare branch is not dead, only waiting.
The central metaphor arrives in the next sentence: "You undid me the way / a fire plays a harp." It is a startling comparison, because fire does not play music, it destroys instruments. The poem knows this. The strings are "singing as / they snap," so the music and the damage happen in the same instant. The word "undid" works on two levels. Strings come undone when they break, and so does a person. Notice also the sound of the line, where the soft, hissing "strings singing" runs straight into the hard, clipped "snap." The sound enacts the meaning, a sweetness that ends abruptly.
Then comes the poem's wryest moment: "(Each note / can only sound once: / an excellent discipline!)" The exclamation mark is doing a lot here. The speaker pretends to admire the situation as an artistic principle, a rule of one chance and no repeats. The tone sounds brave and slightly brittle, the voice of someone making a joke so as not to say something more painful. This is where the poem's emotional temperature is most visible, because the cheerfulness cannot quite hide what was lost.
Structurally, the poem is fifteen short lines in a single block, with no stanza breaks and no rhyme. It relies instead on enjambment, so that sentences tumble over line endings ("the strings singing as / they snap"), and the reader is carried along as quickly as the strings break. The rhythm is conversational and uneven, closer to speech than to song, which suits a speaker who keeps interrupting himself. Those interruptions are the poem's most distinctive device: three separate parenthetical asides, each lowering the voice like a whisper. The first corrects the opening, the second comments on the fire and the harp, and the third is the final line.
That last line is where the poem turns. After the notes have sounded and the strings have gone, we learn that "They are still together, / your smoke & my fog." The ampersand, rather than "and," joins the two words almost as a physical knot on the page. Smoke belongs to the fire, which is the other person, and fog belongs to the speaker, something cooler and vaguer, a blur. What is left of each is a mist that mingles with the other. Whatever has ended, the two traces have not separated.
Then, in the quietest line of all, the speaker says, "(I feed them wood.)" It is a small domestic action, and it changes the poem. The speaker is not simply mourning; he is tending. Feeding wood to a fire keeps the smoke rising, so the end is being deliberately prolonged. It is also a little ironic, since the thing being fed is the same force that destroyed the harp. The poem leaves open whether this is devotion or a refusal to let go, and that ambiguity is its strength.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It avoids sentimental statements and trusts images instead: branches, strings, smoke, fog, wood. It also reverses the usual direction of a farewell. Most goodbyes close a door, but this one ends in the present tense, with someone still working, still keeping something alight. Grief here is not a moment but a chore, and the poem's dry humor makes that chore feel painfully real.