Three short stanzas, three settings, and in each one the speaker turns out to be a slightly different person. Dave Bonta's "Modes" reads like a set of quick confessions: how I behave in a letter, how I behave in love, how I behave in the garden. The title promises variety, but the real interest lies in what the three modes reveal side by side.
Start with the letter. "I go with the discourse / and stay to discourse." The same word appears twice and changes its job. First it is a noun, the flow of talk or argument the speaker follows. Then it is a verb, meaning to hold forth or talk at length. In two lines the speaker goes from being carried along to lingering and talking. "Go" and "stay" pull in opposite directions, yet both end in more words. There is some gentle self-mockery here, the portrait of a correspondent who sets out to reply and can't stop. Writing breeds writing.
The middle stanza is the darkest and the most open to interpretation. "I varnish a crucifix / and call it love." Varnish is a surface treatment. It protects and shines and makes something look cared for without changing what lies underneath. A crucifix is an image of suffering and sacrifice. So the speaker takes pain, gives it a glossy finish, and then attaches a name. The poem doesn't say whether this is bitter or tender. It could be an admission that we dress up duty, guilt or hurt as affection. It could also be a gentler picture of love as patient, hands-on upkeep of something painful. But "call it love" tilts toward suspicion, since it is what we say when the label is doing more work than the thing itself. The word "love" also begins and ends the stanza ("in love... call it love"), so it frames the crucifix the way a varnish frames wood.
The last stanza changes the speaker's grammar. Before, the speaker acted on something: followed a discourse, varnished an object, applied a name. Now the verb is simply "am": "I am of the garden." There is no tool and no label, and the garden isn't even given an adjective. The closing line, "and come home," is made of three plain monosyllables and is the poem's only arrival. In the letter the speaker "stays" and goes on talking, but here the movement ends. Judging by the imagery, both the crucifix and the garden carry Christian echoes, so the poem may quietly set a handled, man-made religious object against a living place that needs no polishing. That is an inference, though, and the poem never insists on it.
The construction is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters in the version we have, and the diction is everyday. Each stanza follows the same shape: a short line that sets the scene ("in a letter," "in love," "in the garden"), a longer line where "I" acts, and a short closing line. Repetition does the work rhyme might have done, and each repeated word turns. "Discourse" goes from noun to verb. "Love" goes from a state the speaker is in to a name the speaker hands out. "Garden" goes from a place to an identity. The pattern has a quiet logic. The first two stanzas are about language, in the form of discoursing and calling, and the third has no talking at all. The poem moves from words toward belonging.
Its significance lies in that economy. In nine short lines it admits a habit most people share, which is using language to smooth over experience, and it does so without lecturing. It also seems aware of itself. A poem about varnish that leaves its own surface unvarnished, with no ornament, no punctuation and no rhyme, is practising what it describes. For students it is a useful example of how much a few repeated words and a firm structure can carry. It also leaves a real question open: if letters and love are mediated by words, is the garden the only mode in which the speaker is simply themselves?