Dave Bonta's poem starts before the day does and ends with its speaker alone, chewing. In between come twenty-two unrhymed couplets, each a single glimpse: a moon, a truck, an owl, two eggs, a polling place, a quarry. Nothing is explained, and no "because" joins one scrap to the next. The title, which twists the familiar phrase "the remains of the day," suggests what holds them together. This is a poem about leftovers: what is still there when the dark has been cleared away, and what a person does with it.
The grammar carries much of the meaning. There are almost no complete sentences, only noun phrases and participles: the moon *falling*, the truck *gargling*, groundwater *feeding*, roots *becoming* tunnels, lungs *laboring*. Everything is caught mid-motion, so the poem feels like a present tense that never settles. The images also swap machine and body. The 18-wheeler is given a throat ("gargling with compressed air"), and many couplets later the speaker's own lungs are described like an engine, laboring "non-stop for 56 years." The fox is a "hypothetical fact" and the coyote "a rumor," so the night's animals are known only by inference. Even the owl arrives as a bare pair, "open eye / closed eye," with the plain parallelism of a blink.
The word "feeding" returns three times: groundwater feeds the stream, which feeds the sewage plant, and hand-colored ballots feed the voting machine. Eggs are cooked, and the poem ends with chewing. The landscape here is a chain of intake and output in which wild and built things are not separate. A hemlock's roots make tunnels, a storm drain cover becomes an "iron mandala," and a welded railroad seam becomes kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending with visible gold. The speaker's wry admission that this is an "attempt" to see contrails "too" as kintsugi is one of the poem's warmest moments. It also shows the poem's interest in repair that stays visible, much as the speaker's bruised heel does.
The polling-place couplets are the most social part. People give each other "side-eye," and the "basket of black / ballpoint pens" gets its own stanza. No candidates or issues are named, so the civic ritual shrinks to small gestures and a faint mutual suspicion. The word "afterwards" then moves the poem on to drains and ruins, as if voting were one more item among the day's remains.
The stone sequence is the poem's quiet history lesson. A condemned building, "its quartzitic foundation stones," and "the shallow pits / where they were quarried" cover a whole cycle in three couplets. The hill gives up stone, the stone becomes a structure, the structure is abandoned, and only the pits stay behind. Because the sentence runs across a stanza break, the reader has to wait for the explanation, which echoes the way such histories reveal themselves. The viewpoint then lifts to "high on the mountainside," where the traffic that was an 18-wheeler's gargle at the start is now a distant roar.
The ending turns inward. "Sap congealed in globs / on black cherry bark" is followed by a puzzling thought: it seems "to have a taste / in the way good water does." Good water is prized for tasting of almost nothing, yet it seems to have a taste, and that paradox suits a poem about noticing faint things. Then comes the closing couplet, "remembering nothing of my dreams / i chew and chew." Dreams, the night's real remains, are gone, so the speaker works on what is physically present: bark, sap, jaw. Since finite verbs are rare in the poem, "i chew" lands with unusual weight. Its doubled verb also echoes the paired eyes of the owl. The chewing can be read as rumination, a slow digesting of the whole list we have just read. That is an inference, but the text invites it.
The poem's significance lies in this modest stance. It has no punctuation, no capital letters, no rhyme, and no grand statement, yet its steady couplets and sharp sounds ("basket of black / ballpoint pens," "snag of a hemlock") give it a firm shape. It treats a commute, a vote, a breakfast, an ageing body, and a mountain with the same careful attention. Its quiet claim is that paying attention is a way of staying alive, and that a day is made of whatever is left once the night has gone.