Dave Bonta's "Postmortem" begins with an unfinished sentence. The speaker dies "with the word I on my lips," and the pronoun never reaches a verb. Death arrives as a pause, and the poem tells us exactly what kind: "a slight pause as if for a line-/break or a comma." The poem breaks the word "line-break" across a line break, so the form acts out what the speaker describes. The central idea is that death interrupts the self rather than ending it with a flourish. What follows is an attempt to imagine what remains of an "I" once the speaking stops, and who, if anyone, will notice it.
The poem's tone is dry and a little mischievous. The speaker compares the moment of death to "a panicked thought" and then to "the time required for an 8-ball / to cross the baize." A pool table is a strange place to find mortality. But the image fits: the black ball is the one that ends the game, and a rolling ball is a small, ordinary stretch of time in which everything is already decided. Such offhand comparisons keep the poem from becoming solemn, which makes the stranger images that follow more unsettling.
Those images turn the speaker's inner life into geography. "The cities I harbor" give way to "squalid refugee camps," as though a person were a country whose structures collapse when the ruler is gone. The word "harbor" suggests both shelter and ports, so the self is something that housed whole populations and now displaces them. Then the poem moves to the sky. The moon "went / through a new phase / of never getting out of bed." The line plays on lunar phases, and the new moon is the dark one. But it also makes the moon sound like an invalid or someone too depressed to rise. The moon is fed "thin broth / that tasted like a landlocked sea." That could suggest a salt lake, though the poem never names one. Either way, the image gives a sea with no outlet, or a taste with nowhere to go. Hospital food, grief and cosmic scale are all mixed together, and that blend is the poem's signature.
The biblical comparison arrives next: "there I floated like Moses / in my open casket." Moses was set afloat in a basket and found by someone who adopted him. The casket plays the part of the basket, and the speaker waits "to be / adopted by Mother Earth." Burial becomes a kind of rescue, though a strange one, since nothing in the poem guarantees the rescue will come. The speaker only waits "to be somehow seen again." The word "somehow" admits the speaker doesn't know how this could happen.
The ending lowers its sights. The speaker doesn't hope for heaven, or for mourners, or even for remembrance. The only hoped-for witnesses are "the mute-belled lilies of the valley / and their brawny, tawny bee." The flowers' bells are silent, a quiet reversal of funeral bells. The bee is loud with life. "Brawny, tawny" is the poem's most musical moment. The two adjectives nearly rhyme, and "bee" also echoes "to be" from a few lines earlier, so the poem closes on a sound that quietly repeats its own wish. Being, being seen and the bee all rhyme.
Formally, the poem is free verse. It has no fixed meter, no regular rhyme scheme and uneven line lengths. Its sentences run on through enjambment, which suits a speaker who has just been cut off. The sound patterning is therefore scattered rather than systematic, and it gathers at the end.
What makes the poem worth reading is its combination of wit and tenderness. "Postmortem" can mean the time after death, but it also suggests an examination of the body, and here the examination is of the self. Instead of a grand vision of the afterlife, Bonta offers a modest one. The speaker was a whole world of cities, and the most it asks is that something small, living and unsentimental should look back.