Twenty-six words are enough for Dave Bonta to set up a secret meeting, hint at a betrayal and leave the speaker unsure who they have become. The title, "Assignation", is an old-fashioned word for a tryst, a lovers' appointment kept in secret, and the poem delivers exactly that: two people "in the forest, out / of the way", far from anyone who might see. Yet the poem refuses to say who is who, and what it leaves unsaid is its real subject. The central idea is that a night of illicit pleasure does not stay where it was had. It follows the speaker into daylight as guilt, discomfort and a feeling of being divided.
The most unsettling moment is the phrase "his wife / a pretty woman". It doesn't fit neatly into the sentence. Grammatically it hangs off "we lay together" without a verb, like a thought that slips out before the speaker can stop it. Judging by the text, there are at least two readings. The speaker may be lying with a man whose wife is somewhere else, and the remark about her prettiness is a flicker of guilt or comparison. Or "his wife" might be the person lying in the forest. The poem never settles it. The flat, almost gossipy tone of "a pretty woman" is also strange in a love scene. It sounds like someone trying to be casual about a fact they can't ignore, and the third party they are betraying slips in without any drama.
The form carries this nervousness. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short, broken lines in stanzas of two, two and three lines. The line breaks cut phrases in awkward places, as if the poem is catching its breath. "Out / of the way" splits an everyday idiom in two, so that "out" briefly stands alone. The stanza break falls between "we lay" and "together", so the lovers are separated by white space at the moment the poem names their union. "Lay" may also faintly echo "lie", though that is an inference, and the pun is not stated. Then the second stanza ends on a dangling "And", which pushes the reader across the gap into the morning. The only full stop comes after "woman", so the poem pauses just when the wife has been mentioned, and everything after it feels like consequence.
The imagery turns sharply between the two halves. The first is hushed and spare, with only the forest and the pair of bodies. The second is crude and physical: "blood / and fleas". The night outdoors has left marks. The forest that gave privacy also gave bites, and what felt like escape from rules became a return to the animal body. The fleas feed on the speaker, so the blood is arguably "me" and the fleas "not me", a small parasitic version of the poem's last phrase. That phrase, "me / and not me", is the emotional centre. The line break after the first "me" leaves a moment where the speaker seems whole before the self is cancelled out. It can be read as a bodily fact, since the speaker's blood is now inside other creatures. It can also be read as moral and psychological, the sense of waking as someone you barely recognise after doing something you wouldn't have claimed as yours.
The poem is worth reading for how much it holds back. It gives no names, no reasons, no judgement and no explanation of whether the night was joyful or regretted. Any heat in the first stanza is understated, and the morning shows its cost in blood and fleas rather than in a confession. Because the reader has to fill in the gaps, the guilt feels like their own discovery. The poem also shows how a tiny space, a few lines and a handful of plain, short words can hold a whole moral situation. By ending on "me / and not me" rather than a lesson, Bonta lets the doubleness stay unresolved, which is how such mornings often feel.