Most poems about loss are sad about it. Dave Bonta's "The Unlearning" is odd because it sounds almost cheerful, like a friend explaining how to pack light. It begins with an instruction, "first let go," and gradually widens into a picture of a whole life being put down, piece by piece, until nothing is left to hold except the quiet of an evening. The central idea is that forgetting is not only something that happens to us. It can be a relief, and perhaps even a kind of peace.
The poem arranges what we let go of in a careful order. It starts with things so minor that surrendering them feels like a joke: "the obscurer wildflowers," "the quadratic formula," "the plots of novels / you'll never read again." The comparative "obscurer" is slightly off-kilter and playful, and for a student the quadratic formula is a pleasingly cheeky example. These are the easy losses, and the speaker admits as much: "it gets easier the less / you cling to things." The line break after "less" lets the sentence loosen as it goes, which is exactly what it describes.
Then the stakes rise. The question "do you need to know for example / how to make fire / or small talk / or change" lists survival, social grace and money or transformation in the same breath. The short lines, each beginning with "or," slow the reading down so each item gets weighed. "Change" is the most slippery word here. It can mean coins, and the ability to "make change," but it can also mean the act of changing, which is a very different kind of knowledge to give up.
From there the poem moves from the mind into the body. "The stomach forgets milk / feet forget the ground" is built from two matching halves, and the repeated "f" sounds in "feet forget" make it feel like a small chant. Judging by the imagery, the unlearning here runs backward through a life, past adult skills and even past infancy, toward a state before we ever walked or fed. The effect is both tender and eerie, because the body is supposed to be the part of us that remembers without being told.
The poem's final surrender is the largest one: "eventually one surrenders / time itself." The pronoun shifts here from the personal "you" to the more distant, formal "one," as though the speaker steps back to take in the whole human situation. Time is handed over "to the blur of eternity," and the poem immediately shrinks eternity down to something small and domestic: "a cat sleeping in the sun." The grammar leaves it open whether the cat is eternity itself or simply what eternity looks like. Either way, the vast idea becomes a warm, drowsy animal, and the soft "s" sounds of "sleeping in the sun" make the line nearly sleepy to say.
The last couplet goes further. "While the livestock settle / moaning into their stalls" is a dependent clause with no main verb to finish it, so the poem never reaches a full stop. In fact it has no punctuation at all and no capital letters, which makes it read like one long thought that drifts off rather than ends. The image suggests dusk and the end of a working day. The word "moaning" is ambiguous, since it could mean contentment or lament, and the poem declines to choose. Perhaps that is its honesty: letting go may be both comforting and sorrowful at once.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The poem is free verse, mostly in couplets, with one quatrain where the questions about fire, small talk and change need extra room. That plain, conversational shape suits its theme, because a poem about shedding ornament would feel false if it were heavily ornamented itself.
What makes it worth reading is its reversal of a familiar assumption. School, in particular, teaches us that life is about gathering knowledge. This poem quietly suggests that the last lesson may be learning to lose it, and that the ending of that process looks less like emptiness than like animals bedding down for the night.