Dave Bonta opens with a request for faith: "let us believe in the ruined / gardens of imagination." The faith is not in gardens that have survived. It is in ruined ones. The title says the poem starts from a line borrowed from another poet, and the speaker takes it over almost at once, claiming "my wishbone song" as his own. A wishbone is something you break in order to hope, so the song already carries both desire and fracture. What follows is a walk through an autumn landscape in which beauty and decay keep appearing in the same breath.
The poem is honest about its own consolations. Leaves "whisper" a song, but the speaker immediately undercuts it: it is "really just a rhythm imposed / on the slow fires of decay." A poem that doubts its own music is unusual, and the doubt makes the later radiance more convincing. The word "fires" matters too. Decay is described as burning, so rot and glow become one process, and that prepares for the "scarlet oaks glowing" later on.
The form supports this. The poem is thirteen unrhymed couplets in lowercase, with almost no punctuation, so the sentences drift across the gaps. "The dead have nothing / and everything to do" breaks off, and the thought only finishes two lines later, "with the emptiness / of numbers." Because of that delay, "nothing" and "everything" sit uneasily side by side before the sentence resolves. The couplets are short enough to feel like footsteps through leaves, and the missing full stops mean the walk never formally ends.
Sound does the work that rhyme usually would. "Glistening listen" is the best example: the word "listen" is tucked inside "glistening," so the church bells seem to ring through the phrase itself. Elsewhere the soft consonants of "leaves underfoot whisper / my wishbone song" make the lines feel hushed, and then the poem turns comic and loud. Witch hazels dangle "sun-colored sex flags," a deliberately blunt phrase that makes the flowers seem cheeky rather than dignified. The woodpecker sounds "like a clown on amphetamines," which punctures any solemnity that has built up. Judging by the imagery, the speaker distrusts elegiac hush and lets absurdity in to keep the poem honest. The "carnival" of the dead fits this mix, since it suggests a festival and a funeral at once.
The landscape contains real damage. The scarlet oaks glow "on a mountainside / of charred pine stumps." The brilliant color is set against burned ground, and the poem refuses to pick between them. Readers can enjoy the oaks without pretending the stumps are not there.
Then comes the poem's sharpest turn: "my phone can find / the bleakest news in seconds." Earlier, "the emptiness / of numbers" could be read as the way the dead are reduced to statistics, and the phone suggests that reading, though the poem never says so outright. The contrast is between two ways of facing loss. The phone delivers it instantly and in bulk. The woods deliver it slowly, through color, sound, and rot, in a form a person can actually take in. The poem does not ask us to ignore the news. It sets a slower, more bodily attention beside it.
The last image carries the argument. A shaggy mane mushroom "dissolves into ink." Shaggy manes really do break down into a black liquid as they age, so this is exact observation as well as metaphor. Decay becomes the material of writing, and the mushroom's disappearance turns into the very thing a poem is made from. This echoes the earlier confession that the song is "just a rhythm imposed": the poem knows it is made out of loss, and it says so. The ending is also quiet, a small, precise, slightly eerie image where a grand conclusion might have gone.
What makes the poem worth reading is its balance. It does not console cheaply, and it does not give in to despair either. It manages to be funny, observant, and sorrowful in the space of a few short lines. The faith it asks for at the start is a modest, practical one: look closely at what is falling apart, and notice that it still shines.