Most to-do lists are meant to get you ahead of the day. Dave Bonta's six-line "To-do list" does the opposite. Its instructions grow stranger and slower as they go, until the list has stopped being about tasks at all.
The first line sets the scale: "Practice walking; begin in the yard." Walking is something we assume we can already do, so the word "practice" makes the speaker, or the reader, sound like a toddler or someone starting over. "The yard" is the smallest, nearest piece of ground, and the semicolon makes the second half sound like a gentle correction. Then comes "talk to a stone." The instruction is faintly comic and faintly devout. A stone can't answer, so the talking becomes a way of paying attention rather than exchanging news. The poem is training a different kind of patience.
"Do nothing." is the hinge. At two words it is the shortest line, and it cancels the premise of the form, since a to-do list shouldn't contain an order to abstain. The line break leaves white space on either side of it, so the reader is made to do a little nothing too.
After that the poem moves from the yard to the kitchen, from outside to inside, and its tone changes. "Let a black dog into the kitchen" is the longest line, and its verb differs from the others. Practice, begin, talk and eat are commands, but "let" grants permission. The dog is something to admit, not something to achieve. In English a "black dog" is a long-standing image for low moods, and in folklore black dogs are often uncanny visitors. The poem never says which it means, so any such reading is an inference from the colour and from the way the dog crosses a threshold. Still, the kitchen matters. It is where raw things are made safe and edible, so letting something dark in there suggests taking it in rather than shutting it out.
The final sentence is the most unsettling: "and eat a great head, / too much to boil." Its grammar is loose. Is the dog doing the eating, or is the reader still being given orders? And what is the "head"? It could be a cabbage, the sort of vegetable a cook complains is too big for the pot. It could also be something far more disturbing. The line break after "head" holds the word in the air for a moment before the practical, domestic complaint arrives and half-tames it. Menace and comedy sit in the same phrase and neither cancels the other. "Great" adds an old-fashioned, almost fairy-tale weight, as if the thing belongs to a giant's kitchen.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run six, five, two, seven, five and four words, so the poem swells as the dog enters and then shrinks back. Most of the words are plain, one-syllable ones. Phrases like "black dog," "great head" and "too much" land with a thud, one heavy stress after another, which makes the voice sound like a recipe or a household instruction. The first sentences are short and brisk. The last one spills over three lines and loosens, as though the list is slipping out of its writer's control.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes the most businesslike of forms and fills it with attention, idleness and appetite. Relearning to move, speaking to what won't reply, doing nothing and admitting the dark are all tasks that can't be ticked off. The ending offers no moral, only something "too much to boil," a thing too large to be cooked down into sense. The poem seems to accept that some things resist being managed, and its calm, practical tone suggests that is simply something to live with.