Dave Bonta's title does two jobs at once. "Gray matter" is the everyday name for the brain, but in the poem it is first something you can stand on: weathered, glittering stuff underfoot. By the end the two meanings have merged. The ground behaves like a mind, the mind like ground, and both are growing old. That doubleness is the poem's central idea. Its quiet conclusion is that close attention to something as unglamorous as gray leaves a person humbled rather than clever.
The opening shows how carefully the poem plays with language. "underfoot the piece / meal of it" breaks "piecemeal" in half, so the word is literally in pieces, and the stray "meal" hints at something eaten away bit by bit. Then comes "what was once gray sand / now glitters under lichen." The word "once" brings in deep time. Judging by the imagery, loose sand has become a hard surface that lichen now grows on. The gray is not dead, though. It glitters. When night falls, the speaker sees "the lunar / landscape of it," and the phrase "of it" echoes the earlier "meal of it," like someone who keeps pointing at the thing they cannot quite name. The dark ground becomes "shivery with crickets," a sound-filled place. Then the abstract phrase "dense with ambiguities" arrives, and for the first time the mind slips into the scene. In the dark, shapes are uncertain, and the ground starts to look like thought.
The middle of the poem turns to ageing. "the way bare wood weathers / or old snow collects grime" offers two ordinary processes that end in gray, and neither is called ugly. They are simply what time does. Then "aging in place" borrows a phrase usually applied to people growing old where they have always lived, and gives it to stone. "lost in a maze of cracks" works for a fractured surface, but it also suggests the folds of a brain. The poem never says so outright, yet the idea of a mind lost in its own passages is hard to avoid. Just as quietly, it lets that thought stand without sentimentality or alarm.
The form supports this restraint. There are eight unrhymed couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters, not even for "i." Many lines are fragments with no main verb, such as "the lunar landscape of it" and "dense with ambiguities." They read like notes jotted down while walking, with observations laid side by side rather than argued. Rhyme is replaced by texture. The hard sounds in "gray," "glitters" and "grime" return, and the clipped k-sounds of "crickets," "collects" and "cracks" seem to crackle like the insects themselves. Line breaks keep surprising the reader, splitting "piece / meal" and later "micro / dose," so that the poem's pace is a series of small stumbles, like walking on uneven ground.
That "micro / dose" belongs to the poem's only "i": "i have taken my micro / dose of humility." The phrase sounds like medicine, a tiny measured amount, and it suits the scale of the scene. Nothing grand happens here. A person looks at lichen and cracked stone and comes away a little smaller in his own estimation, which the poem treats as a cure rather than a loss.
The last couplet widens the view upward: "the high line buzzes / with ghosts of power." The power line's hum echoes the crickets, but it is a manufactured sound, and the poem calls it a ghost. Set against slow geological change, human power seems faint and haunting. There may also be a quiet link to the brain, which runs on electrical signals, though that is an inference from the imagery rather than something the poem states. The poem ends on a hum rather than a conclusion, which fits its refusal to explain itself.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much thinking it does with so little. A pun in the title becomes a way of seeing, in which landscape and mind are made of the same worn, cracked, glittering material. The poem teaches attentiveness by example: slow down, look at what is underfoot, and notice that even gray is full of sparkle, noise and ambiguity.