Etiquette books usually teach you which fork to use. Dave Bonta's "The will to sadness" borrows their calm, authoritative voice for something stranger: a code of conduct for living with sorrow. The epigraph credits the phrase to a drawing by Alejandra Pizarnik, from *The Galloping Hour: French Poems*. The poem seems to start from those few French words, "la volonté de tristesse", and unfold them into instructions. The key word is "will." Sadness here is not something that simply happens to a person. It is chosen, practised and cultivated like a skill.
The form supports that idea. The poem is eight couplets with no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation at all, so the instructions seem to drift past one after another. What holds them together is grammar. "One ought," "one must," "one must," "one who is oneself," "everything one knows": the impersonal "one" is the pronoun of drawing rooms and rulebooks, and it gives the poem a formal, slightly comic dignity. Words like "decorum" push the joke further. But the rules themselves are bizarre. Nobody's manners guide includes "let lost pieces of oneself / get eaten by opossums." The gap between the prim voice and the odd content is where the poem finds both its humour and its tenderness.
The imagery is small, earthy and unglamorous. The first couplet asks us to stay "partially buried at all times," and the line break after "at least" makes the hedge sound almost polite. Opossums, which scavenge and are famous for playing dead, belong naturally to this half-buried world. Lost pieces of the self are not mourned or hoarded; they are simply fed to animals, so loss becomes part of an ecosystem. Reading the paper "upside-down and backwards" suggests a refusal of the official version of events, or perhaps the habit of seeing familiar things from the wrong side, which is what poets do. The fourth couplet is the strangest. We are told to "give names to the flies / but not to the joyful spider." Naming is a kind of affection, so the poem seems to say that sadness makes us tender toward the small, doomed and overlooked, while joy, here a predator and still joyful, is best left unlabelled and alone. That is an interpretation, but the odd adjective "joyful" invites it.
Water slowly takes over the second half. Dancing "as if drowning" leads straight into the self as "a sort of small salt lake." The phrase is modest ("a sort of," "small"), and the hushed s-sounds of *sort*, *small* and *salt* make the line sound like something said quietly. A salt lake is enclosed and shrinks in the heat, leaving crusts of salt behind, an image that easily suggests tears. It is also water that holds a body up, so the drowning of the previous couplet may be answered by a self that floats. The sentence has no verb, as if the self were too still to act.
The last two couplets move from rules to nature. Decorum is to be followed "as one follows the weather," which means not controlling it but watching it, dressing for it and accepting it. Then the commanding "must" gives way to a quieter verb: "everything one knows about rhythm / one learned from the rain." The poem has no regular meter, only short, plain lines that fall unevenly, like drops on a roof. Rain also feeds the salt lake, so the ending quietly closes the circle, and the final word is the simplest one in the poem.
What makes the poem worth reading is its balance. It refuses both wallowing and forced cheerfulness. Sadness becomes a discipline of attention, learned from animals, weather and water rather than from self-pity, and the deadpan humour keeps it from becoming gloomy. A reader finishes with a feeling more than an argument: that being sad can be a graceful way of paying attention to the world.