Two tiny tercets with a block of dream-prose wedged between them: Dave Bonta's "Descent" has a balanced, almost architectural shape, and the balance is the point. The opening lines give us katydids "in and out of sync," then, in the last line, "our ragged breaths." That single word "our" turns a note about insects into a scene of two people in the dark, listening to the night while their own breathing drifts together and apart. The poem never says whether they are awake or asleep, and that blur prepares us for what follows.
The prose paragraph reports a dream in flat, matter-of-fact language, like someone reading out an inventory. The speaker's Pennsylvania hometown has "partially merged with London." Everything has grown: "multiple high-rise apartment buildings now, rather than just one," a wider river, a "sprawling industrial complex," a poor district with "a distinctly bohemian flavor." That last detail is quietly funny, since the dream has gentrified the old neighborhood without being asked. Because the speaker mentions a British wife, it is tempting to read the merged town as a picture of marriage itself, two places and two histories folded into one landscape. That is an inference, but the poem invites it.
Then comes the title's descent. The wooded hill, a natural thing, holds a "glassed-in staircase," a man-made one that is see-through and nearly empty. The speaker goes down it "in great leaps, nearly flying." Descent usually suggests falling, but here it feels like release. It also suggests sinking into sleep, which is how dreams begin. The wife's question, "how can you do that and not get hurt?", is the sensible voice of waking life. She appears "undercover as a Bond girl," a comic touch that also hints at something more serious: even the person closest to us keeps a part of herself hidden, playing a role we can't fully see through.
The speaker's reply is the hinge of the poem: "This is all just a dream, I tell her. Is it real for you?" He seems to know he is dreaming, yet he asks his wife whether the experience is real for her. The question could be aimed at a dream figure, or it could slip out of the dream toward the actual person lying beside him. Either way, it admits that no one can enter another person's inner life. We share a bed, a town, a language, and still each of us is inside a separate dream.
The form is loose. Nothing rhymes, and there is no regular meter. The two tercets resemble haiku, but a quick count gives roughly three syllables, then five, then four in the first, and three, five, three in the second, so the poem borrows the compactness without obeying the rules. The sound work is subtle. "Katydid" is named after the insect's call, so the word itself ticks like the sound it describes. "Ragged breaths" is made of rough, catching consonants (r, g, d, b, th) that make us hear the uneven breathing. The prose, by contrast, is plain and unhurried, with no metaphors, which makes its strangeness (a Bond girl, a staircase you can fly down) feel as ordinary as it does in a real dream.
The finale shows the poem's quiet craft. "In and out of sync" is a description of rhythm; "together apart / together" is a compressed, almost whispered version of the same idea. The line "together apart" can mean being together while separate, or together and then apart, and the final single word "together" gets the last say. Nothing has been resolved, since the wife never answers and the question hangs in the air, but the poem settles on closeness anyway, the way ragged breathing eventually falls into a shared pattern.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. In a few lines, it manages to be a nature note, a dream diary, a joke and a meditation on marriage. It suggests that intimacy is not perfect synchrony but a pulse of drifting and returning, like the katydids in the dark.