A shoelace, an appointment at noon, a poor-house robe: Dave Bonta's "Thinned" starts out looking like a simple inventory of slight things. Yet it runs to only seven lines, and by the last two it has stopped being an inventory at all. What begins as a game of spotting a shared quality ends as an admission of wanting, and the turn is so quiet that you feel it before you notice it.
The title is worth a second look. The first line says "Thin things," a plain adjective, but the title says "Thinned," a past participle, which implies that something has done the thinning. Lace wears thin by being pulled through eyelets, a robe by washing and use. The poem never names the agent, and that silence lets the title drift toward the speaker himself. Perhaps he, too, has been worn down by time. That is an inference, not a statement, but the word "still" in the sixth line lends it some support.
The list is carefully mixed. "Lace in a shoe" is small, tactile and domestic. "A noon appointment" is not an object at all but a sliver of time. The link may be noon, when shadows shrink almost to nothing, or simply the slimness of a slot in a crowded day. "A poor-house robe" brings in society: the word carries a history of charity and scarcity, so thinness becomes cloth worn nearly transparent and also a life with little padding. Then "a reed" arrives from the natural world, slender, hollow and bending in the wind. In four items we have travelled from foot to clock to institution to riverbank, and we are trained to expect more of the same.
The form sets up that expectation and then breaks it. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short, between two and five syllables, so the poem is itself a thin column down the page. But the sound is not careless. The short "i" of "thin" and "things" returns in "in" and again in "still," a faint echo tying the end to the beginning. "Noon" and "shoe" share a long vowel, and the rounded "o" of "poor," "robe" and "road" runs through the list. Punctuation matters too. Each of the first three items after the colon ends in a comma, but "a reed" has none. It slides straight into "and the road," as though the reed and the road, both long, narrow lines, were merging on the page.
The ending is where the poem changes gear. Until now the speaker has been invisible. "I" appears only in the sixth line, and with it the list stops describing the world and starts describing a person. The final item is also the longest, spilling over two lines as if it refuses the neat size of the others. The break after "still" is the poem's best moment. For an instant "I still" could mean "I hold still," an odd thing to say beside a road, before the next line turns it into "even now, I want." "Hanker" is a homely, slightly rueful word, less grand than "yearn," more an itch than a vow. And the poem ends on "after," a word that points forward and leaves the speaker trailing behind what he wants.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it lets thinness mean two things at once. It is loss: worn lace, a threadbare robe, a day cut into slivers. But a reed is a hollow pipe, a lace is what binds a shoe to a foot, and a road is a thin line drawn between here and somewhere else. Seen this way, thin things are also the things that connect and lead onward. The poem never says what the road is, whether an actual journey, a way of living or a younger self, and that openness is part of its economy. It trusts the reader to supply the longing. Seven lines with hardly any ornament, and the image that stays is the last one: someone worn down to essentials who still, stubbornly, wants to be on the way.