Daylight, Dave Bonta suggests, flatters us. In the opening paragraph of "Night from the inside (5)," a daytime walk is called "a fantasy of knowing through seeing": each bend in the path promises that one more look will explain everything. Night removes that promise. The forest keeps "its essential unknowability," and the paragraph ends on a warning: "Without darkness, the very possibility of the wild becomes endangered." The rest of the piece acts that idea out. It is a string of small night encounters in which the speaker keeps failing to see, and keeps being delighted.
The form fits the argument. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Most of the poem is prose, in fragments of different lengths, and the title's "(5)" suggests it belongs to a longer series, though that is only an inference. Some entries run to several sentences, and others are almost throwaways: "It goes on and on. Somebody doesn't have much sense." That is the speaker's dry reaction to the porcupine's clacking teeth, and it shows the tone. Rhythm comes from these shifts between long, reflective sentences and short, deflating ones. The poem moves like someone walking in the dark, with a few steps, a pause, and a listen.
Because sight is unreliable, the other senses take over, and the imagery is built from them. The owl's flight is "absolute silence," so quiet that "Even the moonlight makes more noise," a startling line that gives light a sound. The bat is "less seen than felt — a ripple through the still air." Meanwhile the whip-poor-will offers "monotonous hectoring," and the speaker's own pen is found by touch, not by looking. Even the moon's helpfulness is double-edged. A full moon makes the forest contain "far more beasts," and the speaker has to check three times with a flashlight that the shapes are only logs. Yet the poem adds that real animals, too, hunt and forage more freely in bright moonlight. The imagination and the actual world both grow more crowded.
The best images turn nature into something half-mythical. Trees "don't need heads because they have the sun," and at night what remains is "their gestures of ardent worship silhouetted against the sky." Clouds trying to swallow the moon become "Angels with the jaws of lions," which are beautiful and frightening at once. The poem keeps this double feeling, awe mixed with unease, throughout.
Humor stops the awe from becoming pompous. The speaker admits he is "broke" in the same sentence that calls him "deeply fortunate." Something bumps his chair and runs off, and he guesses at "A near-sighted fox? A not-so-wily coyote?" The short three-line pieces, which read like haiku though they do not keep a strict syllable count, are playful puns. In "moon bathing / that elusive piece / of soap," a bath in moonlight becomes a slippery bar of soap. In "moon dog / taking off my glasses / to make sure it's real," the speaker doubts his own eyes, which is exactly the lesson of the opening.
The Spanish lines at the center, with their English translation, work as a hinge: "Only the moon suspects the truth. / And that is that Man doesn't exist." Set in another voice and language, they briefly remove the human viewpoint, so that the moon, not the observer, is the one who knows. The poem then closes by bringing the wild inside the speaker. His noisy digestion startles him, and he likes "the idea of the wild within — our gut microflora — helping to safeguard us against the wild without." The final image makes the speaker himself a place of unknowing and teeming life. It is half joke and half serious thought, and it dissolves the line between watcher and forest.
The poem is significant for how modestly it makes its case. It never lectures about conservation or light pollution, though the opening sentence about the wild being "endangered" hints that darkness is something worth protecting. Instead it shows what we gain by not seeing: surprise, humility, and the sense that the world is larger than our knowledge of it.