A moth lands on a laptop screen, a man keeps typing, and almost nothing happens. That is the point. Dave Bonta's poem is a small scene of a man at work late on a hot night. It quietly asks what happens to a person whose job is to look at things and judge them, when a living creature, and perhaps a living person, is within reach.
The moth is drawn "in / by the glow of his laptop," and the phrase works twice. It is a plain description of how moths behave. It also sets up a parallel with the man, who is just as drawn to his own glow and just as absorbed. The moth "clings to the flat screen / with wings outstretched," a pose that looks like a specimen pinned for study. The word "flat" matters here. The screen is two-dimensional, and the moth is briefly flattened into it. Then comes the poem's best detail: "a few pixels show / through the clear patches / in the center of each wing." The creature becomes a lens, and the critic's text is seen through its body. The image is delicate and a little uncanny. It suggests the moth has lost some of its dusty scales, since those clear patches are where the wing is bare, and so it is both fragile and oddly useful, a living window laid over the words.
The poem's only speech follows: "Does that feel good? he murmurs / when the blinking cursor passes / underneath it." The line can be read two ways. It might be tender, a man idly noticing that the moth is being brushed by the cursor. It might also be faintly mocking, even predatory, since he is toying with something small and trapped. The ambiguity is deliberate. Nowhere does the poem say which tone is right, so the reader has to decide, much as a critic decides about a text. The question is also notable because it is the only moment of attention to another being's feeling. It is asked of a moth, and it is asked in passing.
Next the poem widens its view without leaving the room: "The bedsprings creak / in the other room." The poem never says who is there, so anything more is inference. Still, set beside a man murmuring "Does that feel good?" to an insect, the sound suggests a closer kind of company that he is not attending to. Whatever the cause, the sentence is flat and unexplained, and it makes the critic's room feel like a place where life is happening next door.
The last sentence runs across eight lines and carries the poem out to the window. Past "the softly whirring fan," the "famous skyline flickers / with heat lightning." Calling the skyline "famous" is a sly choice. It is an impressive view that the poem refuses to name or describe, treated as something known only by reputation. The lightning is another distant glow, the third in the poem after the screen and the cursor, and it is silent and out of reach, like the moth's attraction. The poem ends not on the skyline but on "his fingers go[ing] on / clattering / over the keys," so the critic's work, mechanical and unbroken, has the last word.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The short, mostly breath-sized lines read like quiet observation. Yet hard *c* and *k* sounds recur: "clings," "clear," "cursor," "creak," "clattering," "keys." They build up like the tapping of a keyboard, so the typing seems to be in the poem's own sound. The soft "softly whirring fan" is the one gentle exception.
The poem is significant for what it declines to say. It never condemns the critic, and it gives him one moment of curiosity. But its details of the screen, the cursor, the distant skyline and the creaking bed all show a person whose attention stays on the surface of things, while the real events are in the next room or behind the glass. It leaves the reader to wonder what a critic misses while reading.