Ordinary bedding does a surprising amount of work in Dave Bonta's "Blankets (a simple song)". The speaker counts out four blankets with the easy rhythm of a nursery rhyme: "one is the color of a clear winter sky, / one is the color of the river, / one is the color of the Atlantic ocean." The fourth, arriving after an ampersand, is "the color of your eyes." In four lines the poem has pulled sky, river and sea into a bedroom, then placed the person addressed among them. Those eyes are as large in the speaker's world as the Atlantic.
The next move is a paradox. Blue is the colour of cold things, and the first blanket is a *winter* sky, so we might expect a chill. Instead the speaker is "warm, too warm." The repeated word stumbles over itself, and "too" is the point where comfort tips into irritation. The central idea is that being wrapped in reminders of someone is not the same as having them. Four blankets cannot add up to one pair of eyes, and the surplus warmth turns into "toss & turn." The sounds do some of the tossing, with that bumping *t* running through "too," "toss" and "turn."
What follows is the cleverest piece of construction. Three negative similes arrive in a row: "not like an airplane in a winter sky, / not like a salmon swimming upstream, / not like a buoy riding out a storm." Read them against the opening and they retrace the blankets in order: sky, river, ocean. The poem revisits its list of blues only to refuse each one. These images are also dignified. An airplane has a destination, a salmon has a fierce purpose, and a buoy holds its place while the storm rages. The speaker declines all of them, because his restlessness has no direction, no heroism and no use.
Then comes "but," and the scale collapses: "like a piece of grit / in a drop of salt water." After the sky and the Atlantic, we are down to a single drop. Grit is an irritant, and salt water suggests a tear, or the sea shrunk to almost nothing. Grit in a drop of salt water is also close to what happens in an eye, where a tear washes out a speck. The last line, "exiled from the blue of your eyes," loops back to the fourth blanket. The speaker ends up as a speck displaced from the very colour he began by matching. "Exiled" is a heavy, political word to use in a bedroom, and the poem never says what caused the separation. Judging by the word, though, it was not something the speaker chose. The syntax is also slippery: it is not entirely clear whether the grit or the drop is the exile.
The form keeps all this feeling light. There is no rhyme scheme, and the poem is free verse. But the first line, "I have four blankets on my bed," falls almost into a regular beat, like the opening of a folk song, before the lines loosen and lengthen. The repeated phrases "one is the color of" and "not like" work as a refrain, which suits the subtitle's promise of a "simple song." The ampersands, used twice, give the page a casual, handwritten look. The dash after "turn" works as a hinge, a pause before the speaker lists what he is not and finally says what he is.
The poem never says "I miss you" or "I am lonely." That absence is what makes it worth reading. Longing comes through objects and comparisons, and through the odd discomfort of being too warm. In thirteen short lines it travels from the whole sky to one drop of water and makes that shrinking feel like the shape of missing someone. The song is simple only on the surface.