Five two-line stanzas, five small scenes, and almost nothing connecting them except a mood. Dave Bonta's "Hanging jack" reads like a dream recalled in the morning: each image is vivid and slightly wrong, and the logic holds only while you're inside it. Still, a pattern emerges. The poem sets music against appetite, and the lute against the fire, and it ends on a quiet admission of failure.
It opens with a sentence that has lost its verb: "My lute an office / where I expect to walk." An instrument becomes a workplace, a room with a routine, and the speaker expects to *walk* in it, as though music were a corridor. The grammar is as odd as the idea. Nothing is stated outright; the lute simply *is* an office, and the reader has to accept it. The next stanza gives a feeling to an object: "I found a stone in mourning / for the temple." The stone grieves for the building it presumably once belonged to, and the line is both funny and sad. Something sacred has gone, and only a fragment is left to notice.
Then the poem turns to the kitchen. "Bread and butter were discoursing / of the great eater." The word "discoursing" is grand and almost churchy, so the everyday pair, bread and butter, sound like scholars or preachers. What they discuss is a figure of huge appetite, a "great eater." Notice how the sound moves from stanza to stanza: "great eater" leads into the next stanza's "heat," and the shared *eat* in "great," "eater" and "heat" ties appetite to fire without saying so.
The fourth stanza is the one the title points to. A hanging jack was a device for turning meat over a fire, and here it is remembered "to roast birds—that heat." The dash is the poem's sharpest break. After it the sentence gives up on grammar and leaves a fragment, "that heat," as if the memory were a sensation too strong to put into a full clause. This is the only stanza that says "I remember," and it is the only one grounded in a specific physical thing, a mechanism, with steady turning and patient cooking. The birds are also the first living creatures in the poem, and they are there to be eaten.
The ending brings the lute back: "I played a while on my lute / and could not kill anything." The poem has a ring shape, beginning and ending with the instrument, but the second appearance changes it. After the great eater and the roasting birds, the speaker's music is measured against killing, and it comes up short, or perhaps comes up innocent. Both readings are open. The line could mean that music is the opposite of the appetite and fire in the middle stanzas, a harmless thing in a world of consuming. It could also be a small confession of ineffectiveness, since the music had no force. There is a possible pun too, though the poem never insists on it: "a while" played and nothing killed sounds like a failed attempt to *kill time*. That is an inference from the wording, not something the text confirms, but it fits the weary, idle tone.
The form supports all this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, mostly three to six stresses' worth of plain speech, and each stanza closes with a short second line that lands like a held breath: "for the temple," "of the great eater," "that heat." The vocabulary is almost entirely everyday (stone, bread, butter, birds, lute) with a few formal words, "office" and "discoursing," dropped in to tilt the register. The final line is flat and monosyllabic, with no ornament, which makes the admission feel more exposed.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves for the reader to do. It never explains why a stone mourns or why bread and butter talk. It trusts the juxtapositions: sacred ruin, domestic comedy, the memory of cooking, a musician who can't do harm. If it has a central idea, it is that making music, like grieving or remembering, is a gentle activity set among forces that devour, and that its gentleness may be both its virtue and its limit. The poem asks you to sit with that uncertainty rather than resolve it.