Six lines are enough for Dave Bonta to put us in a grave. There is no build-up. "This morning I find myself / laid out in the grave" begins like a diary entry, with the plain, daily word "morning," and "I find myself" is what we say when we wake somewhere unexpected. The phrasing has the logic of a dream. "Laid out" is also the language of funerals, of bodies prepared by other hands. The speaker doesn't say "I lie" but "I am laid," so he is the object of the action, not its agent. Death is something that has been done to him.
The form is as spare as the situation. The poem is free verse in three couplets, with no rhyme to make it sound neat or consoling. The lines are short and the words mostly plain and brief, and each stanza adds one move: where he is, what he hopes, what he fears. The most interesting move is the break between the second and third couplets. "But I fear" ends a stanza and leaves us hanging. We expect something monstrous, and what arrives, after the pause, is "the wall with a talking clock." A piece of furniture has become the threat.
Hope gets the more delicate image. Bonta doesn't write "I have hope" and leave it abstract. He gives it a shape: "a far tree intended / for many birds." Each word matters. The tree is far, so hope is real but distant, seen from a place that is not near it. It is "intended," a word that suggests purpose, as if someone planted it deliberately. And it is for "many birds," not for the speaker alone. This hope is shared and sheltering, and it belongs to creatures that can fly, which is exactly what a man in a grave cannot do. The dashes make the description feel like an aside, as if the speaker holds the tree at arm's length, unsure whether he is allowed to lean on it.
Against that living, growing thing the poem sets a wall and a clock, both human-made. The wall encloses, and the clock measures. A clock normally ticks; this one *talks*, and anything that can talk can say something false. Since the poem's title is "Mortality," the clock's real subject is time, the one thing we expect to be exact. The poem never says what the lie will be. It might promise more time than there is, or announce that time has run out. Withholding this is clever, because each reader fills the gap with their own worst fear. The grammar adds to the chill: "is going to lie" is not a guess but a flat prediction, delivered with a weary calm.
The last word does the most work. Early on we met "laid out"; at the end comes "lie," and the two echo each other in sound and in sense. The speaker lies in the grave, and the clock lies in the other meaning, the one about falsehood. One short word holds both the body's posture and time's dishonesty. The pronoun is slippery too. "It" could be the clock or the whole wall, and the poem doesn't choose. That uncertainty keeps the final line from feeling tidy.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without explaining. Its title names an enormous abstraction, but the poem itself never uses the word and gives us a tree, a wall and a clock instead. It doesn't tell us whether the grave is a dream, a vision or a metaphor, and it doesn't settle the contest between hope and fear. Fear does get the last line, but the tree is still standing, still intended for the birds. A reader leaves with a small, odd question: if the clock is the one thing we trust to tell us the truth about our time, what happens when it starts to lie?