Dave Bonta's "Residual" begins with a loss and ends with a lullaby, and the poem never explains the link. A prose paragraph circles a man the speaker knew only slightly and who died of a brain tumor thirty years ago. Then ten short unpunctuated couplets follow a walk in the rain, where a cuckoo calls and a bear crashes away through the woods. The central idea is that memory keeps feeling after it has lost facts. The speaker can no longer produce the name or even the whole face, but the warmth of the man survives, and he recognizes it in the way he recognizes a lullaby.
The prose section is built by subtraction. "Not his name. Not quite his face" sets out what has gone, in blunt fragments, before the speaker lists what stays: posture, physique, "good-natured and thoughtful conviviality." The phrase is a mouthful of abstract nouns, and the speaker admits it rests on "possibly no more than half a dozen conversations." Then the language relaxes into slang: "Good times. A good dude." After the careful sorting, the casual verdict feels more honest. The line "Wish I remembered his name" stands alone as a plain confession.
The couplets move to a different kind of writing. Without capital letters or full stops, they read as a sequence of glimpses, and the speaker never explains how they connect to the man. The cuckoo supplies a connection through its reputation. Cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds' nests, so the "fledgling cuckoo / flopping across the road" has been raised by strangers, and its "adoptive parents" are "nowhere to be found." The speaker's response is tender rather than disapproving: "poor little rain-crow / didn't mean to be a parasite." "Rain-crow" is a folk name for the cuckoo, and the rain gathers through the rest of the sequence. The comic clumsiness of "flopping" and the forgiving voice make the bird a figure of innocent dependence, someone who belongs to people who aren't there.
The weather then takes over. "Opening my umbrella / I spook a bear" is funny because it reverses the expected fear, and the speaker's small action frightens the larger animal. The bear is soon reduced to sound and shape: "the crashing of something big / in black velvet." The word "velvet" makes it soft to the touch, and "something" strips away its name. That echoes the opening, where a man is remembered as outline and impression because the label has gone. The bear is only a presence moving through the trees, and so is the dead man.
The sound of these lines also carries meaning. "Widely spaced raindrops" has its stresses spread out like the drops themselves. "Gurgling" imitates running water. "Water still gurgling / under the rocks" quietly reflects the title, since something continues underneath after the downpour has passed. The ground is "storm-downed timber" and "woodferns," and the climb "upslope" keeps the speaker moving, as if the walk were also a way of thinking.
The cuckoo's second appearance is the center of the poem: "a distant cuckoo singing / who are you you you." The speaker hears the call as a question, and it can be taken several ways. It could be addressed to the speaker, or it could be the speaker's question to the forgotten man. It also fits the orphaned chick, who is raised among other birds and so has reason to wonder who it is. The repeated "you you you" makes the call sound both like a bird and like a person asking. Whoever asks it, nobody answers with a name.
What replaces an answer is the last couplet: "I know a lullaby / when I hear one." It borrows the casual shape of the saying "I know one when I see one," so it sounds confident and almost offhand. A lullaby asks for no names, and it soothes and lets things rest. By hearing the cuckoo's call that way, the speaker turns a question about identity into comfort. The forgotten man, the parentless bird and the retreating bear all fit inside the same sound of rain and birdsong.
"Residual" is worth reading because it doesn't tidy up grief or force a lesson on it. It admits that forgetting happens even to people we liked, and it suggests that what remains may be enough: a smile that comes unexpectedly and a sense of a whole period of life. The poem makes that point by letting a walk in the rain do the work.