Morning usually arrives without being asked, which is what makes Dave Bonta's eight-line poem so unsettling. The title, "Missed appointment," gives us the outcome, and the poem supplies a strange, almost fable-like reason. The doctor did not oversleep or forget. Morning simply "came / to the yard but not / to the doctor." Light reaches the outdoors and stops at the threshold of a room where night has stayed behind. The poem never says whether the doctor is asleep, exhausted, ill or something worse. We can only infer from the furniture, and what it suggests is a life that has slipped out of step with ordinary time.
The most loaded word is "guard." Night is personified as a sentry, loyal and a little stubborn, who "stayed" at his post when his shift should have ended. Guards can protect and they can imprison, and the poem does not choose. Perhaps night is shielding the doctor from the demands of the day, or perhaps it is keeping the doctor in. The phrasing also has a deadpan, official tone, as if this were a reasonable excuse for a missed engagement. The responsibility moves from the person to the cosmos: the doctor didn't miss the appointment, morning did. That mixes dry humor with real unease.
The syntax helps create this. The whole poem is one sentence, and its line breaks hand out information in teasing instalments. "Morning came" stands alone for a moment as a complete, cheerful statement before "to the yard but not" takes it back. Then "night" lands at the end of line three, so the word that causes all the trouble hangs at the edge of the line before "having stayed to guard" explains it. The colon after "lodgings" is a hinge. Everything before it is cause, and everything after is a list, as if the poem were opening the door and letting us look in.
There is no rhyme scheme, but there is a steady pulse. Most lines run to about five syllables, a quiet, almost ticking beat, and the last line shortens to four ("ready to shake"), like a step missed on a stair. Sound ties the poem together more quietly. "Yard" and "guard" make a true rhyme, but one is buried mid-line and the other sits at a line's end, so it is easy to miss, just as the poem's two worlds, the lit yard and the dark room, sit very close together without meeting. The long *a* of "came," "stayed," "painted" and "shake" runs from the first line to the last, and the blunt "bad bed" thuds with its flat *b* and *d*.
The final three lines are an inventory, and the poem becomes a still life of a room with no person in it. "Lodgings" suggests rented, temporary space rather than a home. The dresser is "old" and "painted," a surface laid over wear, which hints at making do. "A bad bed" is startlingly plain. It has no simile and no sympathy, only the flat verdict of a child or a tired witness. Then comes the clock, "ready to shake." The phrase can be read two ways. It may be an alarm about to ring, its little hammer trembling, or it may be a worn-out instrument as unsteady as an old hand. Either way, it is the one object that could rescue the appointment, and it is poised but has not yet gone off. A whole system of schedules and punctuality depends on that clock, and night has overruled it.
The poem is significant because it says so much while saying so little. A doctor is a figure defined by showing up, someone other people count on to be there at a set hour. Here the doctor is never seen at all and is described only through a shabby bed, a repainted dresser and a clock that hasn't spoken. Whatever has happened, the poem refuses to explain or console, and it doesn't tell us whether to smile or worry. It leaves us standing in the dim room, listening for the clock, and that uncertainty is what stays with the reader.