A poem that opens by admitting it misses bars and restaurants sounds as if it's heading for a mild complaint. Dave Bonta's "Tadpool" has something stranger in mind. It is a haibun, a form that alternates prose with short haiku-like verses. The references to reopening restaurants and social distancing suggest the pandemic as the backdrop, though the poem never names it. Its subject is isolation, and its method is to let three small scenes of walking, smelling, and dreaming build toward a dark joke.
The prose is chatty and unpolished, and that is deliberate. "I didn't go to bars or restaurants all that often, but I still miss them" sounds like someone talking half to himself. The rhetorical question that follows, "Longing is all about the unattainable, isn't it?", turns an everyday grumble into a small truth. The first verse answers with almost no words: "so much more / than one can hear / hermit thrush." The line break after "than one can hear" lets the sentence swell before the bird arrives. The thrush becomes a figure for everything just out of reach, a song that the ear can't fully hold. Pressed up against the human longing in the prose, it suggests that the world is still full, only not in the way the speaker wants.
The second section drifts into irritation and disgust. The speaker walks at dusk because "the buzzing stops," then confesses his oddly specific dislikes: flies, an itching nose, "some dead animal heaving with maggots." The verb "heaving" is the sharpest word here, because a carcass shouldn't move, and the maggots give it a grotesque imitation of breath. The haiku that follows seems to leave this behind: "ephemeral pond / raccoon footprints fill in / with tadpoles." The alliteration of "footprints fill" softens the line, and the image is almost tender, with life collecting in the marks an animal has left. But it quietly echoes the maggots, since both are crowds of wriggling larvae feeding on a temporary pool or body. Nature here is not sorted into pleasant and unpleasant. It simply teems. The footprints are also tiny, separate puddles, and that detail prepares the ending.
The third prose paragraph moves from the mountain to the news and then to a dream. Restaurants seat mannequins "so diners will feel less isolated," a fix that makes loneliness more visible. The dream pushes this further. The top-hatted skeletons from the Grateful Dead album cover the poem names are "no longer dancing," and "the skulls have somehow lost their grins." A skeleton's grin is fixed in bone, so the image is unsettling because it describes something that cannot change. Even a symbol of carefree mortality looks "disoriented."
The final verse gathers the poem's threads. "Tadpool" is a coinage that squeezes "tadpole" and "pool" together, and it also looks like a small word standing in a small space. Then comes the punchline: "the social distancing / of cannibals." Tadpoles crowded in a shrinking pool can turn on one another, so the line sets two meanings side by side. One is the polite, protective distance of public-health rules. The other is the wary space between creatures who might eat each other. The joke is that distancing may be less a courtesy than a truce, and the poem leaves it unclear whether that is comic or frightening. Because the haiku ends without punctuation, the reader is left to decide.
What makes the poem worth reading is its tone, which swings between wry, squeamish, and haunted without ever raising its voice. It avoids grand statements about the pandemic and works through concrete details instead: a thrush, a footprint, a mannequin, a skull. The haibun form helps, because each verse reframes the prose before it, and the reframing is often unsettling. Longing for company becomes a longing the natural world doesn't share, and a reopening dining room starts to look like a crowded pond.