Look up in Dave Bonta's "Portentative" and the sky looks back, not with wrath or wisdom but with a shrug. "sky face says meh" is the opening line, and it sets the tone. A portent is a sign in the heavens, something humans have read for meaning for thousands of years. Here the heavens answer in the slang of a bored teenager. The title looks like a coinage, perhaps blending "portent" with "tentative." That reading is an inference, but it suits a poem about omens that cannot quite commit to being omens.
The central idea is that we keep searching for meaning in the sky while our own lives, and the living world, shrink beneath it. The poem moves between two scales. One is the human routine of work, noise and exhaustion. The other is the huge, blank sky. Neither offers comfort.
The construction is deliberately spare. There are eight couplets, all lowercase, with no end punctuation, no rhyme and no regular meter. Without full stops, the poem drifts forward like a scroll through a feed, each pair of lines a small, separate observation, like one cloud shape after another. The line breaks do much of the work. "of our anti / bodies of work" snaps the word "antibodies" in two and leaves "anti" hanging at the end of its line. The pun is double-edged. Antibodies are the immune system's defence, and a "body of work" is what a career produces. The suggestion is that our labour has become a defensive reaction against our own lives, or something hostile to them. The next couplet makes that cost concrete: "squeezing whole lives / into a few hours before sleep." The verb "squeezing" suggests a person wringing out the last drops of something.
Against this tired human world, the poem sets the only sincere voices it contains: "six-legged leaves / chant half the night." "Six-legged" points to insects, and judging by the image, leaf-like ones. They are given a religious verb, "chant," as though the real liturgy comes from the nonhuman world while the sky mutters "meh." Meanwhile the sky's face is assembled before our eyes. It "acquires / a round cloud mouth," a nice description of how we see faces in vapour. The face is something we project, and its mouth is round like an "O" of surprise, or like a zero.
Two of the poem's strangest images follow. "The moonlight denies / ever knowing the moon" is a small paradox, since moonlight comes from the moon, yet here it disowns its source. It can be read as a picture of modern alienation, in which we are surrounded by the glow of things and deny any connection to the things themselves. Then comes the darkest line, the longest in the poem: "the lives we're missing bloat like corpses / as species dwindle." "Missing" works two ways. These are lives we are failing to live, and lives that have gone missing from the world. The simile of drowned bodies swelling joins personal emptiness to ecological loss, and the line itself seems to bloat past the length of its neighbours.
The ending is a deflation: "sky face is just the void / with better branding." The phrase "sky face" appears three times, and its arc is clear. First it shrugs, then it grows a mouth, then it is exposed. "Branding" is the language of marketing, and it recasts the old human habit of finding gods and omens above us as a logo stuck on nothing. The word "just" makes the verdict flat and final.
What makes the poem significant is how much it compresses into so little space. It is funny and bleak at once. The jokes, "meh" and "better branding," make the grief about overwork, extinction and lost meaning sharper rather than softer. It also lets an ancient tradition of sky-reading collide with the vocabulary of the present day, and it does so without preaching. The reader is left looking up at a blank sky and wondering how much of its face we painted ourselves.