Flat-pack furniture comes with a warning on the box: some assembly required. Dave Bonta's title turns the phrase inside out, and the poem that follows asks whether being taken apart might be as formative as being put together. It begins in geology, with sandstone slipping "back into sand", and ends up somewhere much closer to the self.
The opening is wary of grand words. "Perhaps one wouldn't / call it metamorphosis" sounds offhand, but the word is carefully chosen. In geology, metamorphic rock is rock transformed by heat and pressure, so the poem is quietly setting dramatic, forceful change against something quieter. The agents of this quieter change are small: frost, "fungal enzymes", the slow work of weather. The verb "prized" does double duty. Here it means levered free, as with a crowbar. A few couplets later, in "why only prize changes / made under pressure", it means to value. The same word shifts from a physical act to a judgement, and the poem gets its argument from that shift: we tend to value the changes we can see being forced on something, and overlook the ones that happen grain by grain.
The hourglass is the poem's neatest image, and it is turned against itself. Sand falling grain by grain is the standard picture of time passing, but this process is "more gradual" than that, and "so much / less reversible". An hourglass can be flipped over. Sandstone cannot be put back together. The line break after "so much" holds the reader a beat before the blunt word "less" arrives, as if the poem were reluctant to admit the loss.
At the "but why" the poem turns from rock to people, and the language turns with it. "It's years of weather / that unfather us" is the most striking moment. "Unfather" is a coined verb, and its prefix echoes the "disassembly" of the title. It also sets up a half-rhyme with "weather", the only real chime in a poem that otherwise avoids rhyme. The sound links the two words, so that weather seems to do the unfathering. The next couplet reverses the picture. "Daily hammer blows / that shape our addictions" borrows the language of the forge or the sculptor's studio, where hammering makes something. Erosion removes, and habit builds, but both come from repetition, not from a single crisis. Together they suggest that a self is made and unmade by the same ordinary pressure of days.
The pronoun also narrows as the poem goes on. It starts with the impersonal "one", widens to "us", and lands on "i", lowercase and unpunctuated like the rest of the poem. The couplets are short and even, with no end-stops and no question mark even where a question is asked. The thought therefore drifts forward the way the process it describes does, without any single decisive moment.
The ending is deliberately hard to pin down. "And i have been baptised / in a saline solution" pulls two ways. Baptism promises rebirth, but salt is also something that wears rock down, and judging by the imagery it may suggest tears, sweat or the sea. The last couplet, "to every ambiguity / a labyrinthine root", leaves its meaning open. One reading is that every uncertainty has a tangled origin. Another, picking up the poem's own imagery, is that roots are among the things that split stone, so the root of an ambiguity may be one of the forces that takes us apart. The long, winding words "ambiguity" and "labyrinthine" slow the reader down, and "saline" and "labyrinthine" share an ending that carries the sound across the final lines.
The poem matters because it takes something we usually treat as loss, wearing down, and asks whether it deserves the name of transformation. It does this without sentiment, using the hard facts of frost, fungus and salt. It also leaves the reader with a question about how much of who we are was made by a few big events, and how much by the quiet weather of ordinary years.