Eight short lines, one stanza, and an entire night: Dave Bonta's "Tar man" drops us into a scene and declines to explain it. We get a company, "the tar-men," and a speaker who has joined them as a student rather than a worker. We never learn what the tar is for, where this happens, or why. The verbs ("boiled") and the word "night" suggest heat and darkness, and the poem lets us build the rest.
The first sentence has the swagger of a philosophy lecture. "I instruct myself / in the nature of tar" is reflexive, since there is no teacher, and "the nature of" is the kind of phrase that normally introduces a grand inquiry into truth or the universe. Here it is pointed at something sticky and black in a vat. The colon at the end of line 3 promises a definition, and what arrives is closer to a recipe: "a great batter, boiled / and simple like a fool." The effect is comic and oddly serious at once.
That definition is worth slowing down on. "Batter" is a kitchen word, and with "boiled" and "fool" it turns heavy industrial work into cooking. (Fool is also the name of a stewed-fruit dessert, which may be an accident or a hidden joke; the poem doesn't say.) The line break after "boiled" leaves the word hanging in the heat before "simple" arrives. The simile is strange because it compares a substance to a person. Tar is pliable, takes any shape, and clings to whatever touches it, so it can seem trusting, even gullible. The word also turns back on the speaker. A man who sets out to teach himself the nature of tar, among people who already know it, might be the real fool. The singular title "Tar man" nudges that reading, as if the outsider were already becoming one of them.
The poem's grammar shifts in the middle. The opening is in the present tense ("I instruct"), but "took" and "found" are past, as though the lesson is being remembered from some distance. "The night took / a few turns in my coat" is the most inventive moment. The break after "took" briefly makes the night a thief, and then the line recovers into something gentler: night pacing, taking turns the way a person strolls up and down a room. "Turns" may also recall the stirring of a paddle in a vat, so the speaker's coat becomes a container being worked like the tar. It is also a dark garment, and judging by the imagery, the night has soaked into it much as tar would. The speaker is absorbing his subject through the body, not only through study.
The last line is flat and deadpan: "I found the pageant strange." "Pageant" is a surprising word for what the men are doing. It suggests costume, procession and spectacle, so the labourers become performers in a ritual lit by fire. "Found" echoes "instruct" from the opening, but the verbs have swapped roles. He set out to learn and ends up merely noticing, still an observer. "Strange" is as plain as a word can be, and that understatement makes the line land harder than a more dramatic adjective would.
The sound of the poem supports this restraint. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines run from three syllables ("The night took") to six, and the shortest line is a held breath before the longest sentence-ending line, which closes the poem with a slow, level pace. The repeated "tar" gives a dull, heavy beat, and the long "a" in "great," "pageant" and "strange" lets the final line echo the earlier ones faintly.
What makes the poem interesting is the gap it opens between knowing and experiencing. High, abstract language ("instruct," "nature") meets humble matter, and neither wins. The speaker's definition of tar is oddly charming but explains nothing, while the human scene around it grows stranger the longer he stays. The poem suggests that learning a thing by immersion does not necessarily make it familiar, and it trusts the reader to sit with that unease without a tidy moral.