"Woke up this morning" is a stock opening for blues lyrics, and Dave Bonta uses it to start a poem that is much more than a pastiche. The speaker is stuck indoors on a rainy morning with feet that want to travel and no reason to give for it. Over twenty lines that restlessness grows from a grumble about the weather into a longing to follow a river, dissolve into the sky, and be held by a woman with earth-dark eyes. The central idea is that the blues is not only a music of loss between people. It can also be a physical ache to belong to the larger movements of the world.
The first image is a good example of the poem's dark humor. The speaker's shoes are "gaping at me like open graves," so ordinary footwear becomes a small threat, and staying put begins to feel like death. The rain "tapping" on the roof makes "a rhythm I could almost feel." That "almost" matters. The rain offers music, but the speaker can't quite step into it. The colloquial voice of "this isn't walking weather / and my feet need to move" states the problem plainly, the way blues lyrics often do, before the poem starts to complicate it.
The strangest and best image comes next. The speaker's restlessness is "that bivalve in my chest" that "keeps opening." The shoes gape and the shell gapes, so the grave-mouths of the opening lines come back as something living and vulnerable. The next couplet adds a paradox: a mussel "gluing down its good foot / so it can rock in the current." The mussel is fixed in place and still swaying, which is exactly the speaker's predicament. There is also a pun, since "mussel" sounds like "muscle," the thing that holds the shell closed or lets it open. The chest, the heart and the body's physical urge to move are all folded into one small sea creature.
From there the poem lets go of its anchor. "I want to go where the river goes / to the sky or its best mirrors" works as a chain of reflections, with the river leading to the sky and to the water that shows the sky back. These "have the blues too in at least / three different ways." The pun on blue as both color and mood is easy to miss because it is delivered so casually, and the poem never says what the three ways are. That vagueness is part of the joke, and it suggests the blues is everywhere without needing a list. These blues "call to me / in the melisma of a mirage." Melisma is a singing term for stretching one syllable across several shifting notes, and it fits a shimmering mirage, which also wavers and never settles on one thing. The sound of the line, with its soft m's and the echo between "melisma" and "mirage," is the most singable moment in the poem.
Structurally, the poem is made of ten unrhymed couplets, and its rhythm comes from speech rather than meter. The line breaks do much of the work. "At least" hangs at the end of one line, so that "three different ways" lands as an afterthought in the next. The poem has no end punctuation and keeps to lowercase line openings, which makes it feel like one long, wandering sentence. Where a blues song would repeat a line for emphasis, the poem repeats a phrase: "I want" begins the final three couplets, and it turns out to be the poem's real refrain.
Those wants grow stranger as they go. "I want the horizon to stop receding" is a walker's impossible wish, since a horizon exists only because you can't reach it. "I want forests to reclaim the fields" asks for the landscape itself to change. Then the last couplet narrows to a person: "a woman whose eyes / are as dark as the earth." The ending can feel like a surprise, but it echoes the graves of the first couplet. The earth that threatened the speaker at the start returns as something to be loved.
The poem is significant for how naturally it stretches an old form. It keeps the blues' plain speech, its bodily complaint and its dry humor, but moves them out of the usual setting into a world of rivers, mussels, forests and weather. The restlessness isn't cured at the end, and the poem is better for not pretending it could be. The speaker is still wanting, and the final line stops without punctuation, as if the song had simply carried on.