Midnight, snow, a man muttering to himself: the scene is small, but the poem's first sentence has already pulled in half the world. Dave Bonta opens with a newsreader's list, a Brexit deal, a Covid stimulus bill, possible signs of intelligent life from Proxima Centauri. The items run from the political to the pandemic to the interstellar, and the tone never changes. Alien contact arrives in the same breath as a legislative vote. That flatness is the poem's first observation about how we live now: we are flooded with news from every scale at once, and little of it touches us.
Then the poem goes outside. "Sitting outside around midnight" is a hinge, and the language changes with it. Abstractions give way to a deer "silhouetted against the snow," picking "her way to the stream, hooves crunching through the icy snowpack." The hard consonants in "crunching" and "icy snowpack" let us hear the cold. The poem is unrhymed, and its rhythm is that of prose, but the prose is carefully varied. Long, breathless sentences are broken by the verbless fragment "And the lacework of tree branches: a threadbare garment." That image matters. Lace and garments are woven things, so the metaphor quietly answers the "cosmic web" mentioned a few lines later. The web of connection exists, but it looks worn thin.
The speaker's own thought is the most interesting sentence. He admits that feeling "connected in some cosmic web" is easy, while sharing "the bleak familiarity of our solitude with strangers" is "another matter entirely." The phrase "bleak familiarity" treats loneliness as something we all know well, almost a common possession, and yet it is hard to admit to anyone. The sentence is grand and a little essayistic, and Bonta undercuts it by tacking on "I mutter to myself" at the end, with no quotation marks around the thought. The speaker seems slightly embarrassed by his own profundity, which makes him easy to trust.
The deer answers, in a way. "Her head goes up, ears pivoting like radio telescopes in my direction." This simile reverses the usual comparison. Radio telescopes are the machines we build to listen for faraway minds, and here they are used to describe an animal's ears. The muttering man becomes the unexpected signal, and a wild stranger becomes the receiver. Nothing is exchanged except attention, but that may be the point. The contact the headlines speculate about across light-years happens for a moment in a snowy yard, silently, between two beings in the dark. The prose ends on "direction," as if the sentence itself were pointing at him.
The title adds another layer. "Heard on High" seems to echo the carol "Angels We Have Heard on High," in which a message comes down from the heavens. Here the messages from above are a news bulletin and a possible alien signal, while the sound that actually reaches us is a hoof breaking ice. Both the deer and the speaker are listening, and the title makes listening the poem's real subject.
After the long paragraph, the closing verse is a deep breath: "power outage / all the glowing lights / in the sky." It has no punctuation and no capitals, and it states no connection to what came before, so the reader has to supply one. Read literally, the blackout lets the stars show. Read more loosely, "power outage" also suggests a loss of the kind of power the headlines were about, and when it fails, other lights become visible. The word "glowing" could mean stars, or it could mean those possible signals. The poem does not say. The sense has also shifted from hearing to seeing, as though the deer's attentiveness has passed to us.
The poem is worth reading because it does not pretend to resolve its tension. It never claims the cosmic web is an illusion, only that it is easier to believe in than to practise. What it offers instead is small and real: a listening animal, a dark sky, and the suggestion that paying attention is itself a form of contact.