Dave Bonta calls his poem "How it started", yet it opens on an ending: spiderlings "before we were dust". That small reversal sets the tone for eighteen lines in which a whole life is compressed into a few images and then quietly deflated. The poem is about the gap between hope and what is actually there. It follows a speaker who mistakes leftovers for new life and, by the last couplet, suspects that two people once made the same mistake about themselves.
The speaker and the "you" are separated early: "while you watched the sunset / i watched darkness climb the trees." One looks at the glowing thing, the other at the shadow rising. The image is slightly eerie, as if darkness were a creature scaling the trunks, and that upward crawl echoes the crawling of the first stanza. Then comes a complication: "the sky never / really gets dark any more." The line break leaves "never" standing alone for a moment, flat and absolute, before "really" softens it. Judging by the phrasing, the speaker may mean the glare of modern lighting, though the poem doesn't say. Either way, even the darkness the speaker was drawn to is no longer the real thing.
The poem's strangest move is the hump. It grows "as a form of protest", a phrase that makes the body sound like a stubborn, sulking colleague. Then it "looms invisibly / over my every croak and cry." The paradox is neat: a hump on your own back is something you cannot see, only feel as weight and posture, and it still looms. "Croak" turns the speaker's voice into something amphibian and aged, while "cry" keeps a trace of real grief. The tone is wry but not light. The speaker jokes because the alternative is only the weight.
Naming is the next gesture: "i call it O for Oblivion / as well as the Obvious." The pun carries a lot. An "O" is the shape of a zero and of an open mouth, the letter lyric poets use to address the heavens, and it is also a curve like the hump. Oblivion and obvious share their first sounds, so the two words seem to slide together, and the joke admits that death is the least surprising thing in the poem. Giving the burden a name is a way of living with it, and the casual "i call it" shows a speaker who has had time to get used to it.
The second half turns on a correction. "what i thought were spiderlings / was the detritus of their eggs." The word "detritus" is cold and clinical after the tender "spiderlings", and it shows what the earlier crawling really was: husks, debris, the evidence of life rather than life. The next couplet generalises with deadpan precision: "in the right light / anything can look promising." This returns to the poem's light-and-dark pattern, the sunset, the sky that won't darken. Promise, the poem suggests, depends on lighting.
That is why the final couplet hurts. "as did you and i / before we were dust" lets the "you" and the "i" share a line for the first time, after being split between sunset and darkness. They looked promising, and "before we were dust" brings the poem back to its first line, so the structure itself closes like a loop. The phrase also sounds oddly backwards, as though dust were something we pass through twice. It recalls the familiar "dust to dust" of funeral language while leaving the order of events unclear.
Formally, the poem is nine unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters, not even for the speaker's "i". The short, plain lines sound like muttered thoughts, and the missing full stops let sentences leak across stanza breaks, as in "though" and "and now". The sound-play is subtle: the hard consonants of "croak and cry", the repeated O, the soft hiss of "spiderlings", "sunset" and "dust".
The poem matters for how much it does without self-pity. It gives no consolation and no sudden uplift, only a clear-eyed revision of what hope looked like. It makes that revision funny, strange and, in the end, tender towards the two people who once looked so promising.