A walking stick that talks, a snake that is heard but never seen: Dave Bonta's short poem opens on a path where everything is sound and suggestion. "Click, clack says my walking stick" gives the stick a voice, and its two hard, wooden syllables answer the "soft buzz of a rattlesnake" that "shivers from the rock." The rattle is described as soft and as a shiver, so the danger sounds more like a nervous tremor than a roar. The snake never appears. It exists only as a noise the speaker has to interpret, and that habit of reading signs drives the rest of the poem.
The second stanza turns from the trail to storytelling. "You go for water & bring back a strange new lover: / that's how it is in the tales the old wives / used to roll between their palms." The sentence is built like a folktale, in which an ordinary errand goes wrong, and the colon makes it a shrug: that's just how it goes. The title helps explain the tone. "Old wives' tales" is usually a phrase for superstition people think they have outgrown. Here the old wives are makers, and their stories are physical things rolled "between their palms," like dough or clay. The "wryness" of the title is the dry, knowing humor of people who have seen what happens when someone goes for water. The word "you" also pulls the reader into the tale. We are the one setting off with a bucket.
The third stanza makes the comparison between story and clay literal. "One long noodle of clay made a bowl, a mirror / you could drink from." The word "noodle" is deliberately homely and takes any grandness out of making. A coil of clay, a snake and a story all share one shape, though the poem leaves that connection for the reader to notice. The bowl is a "mirror / you could drink from," which links back to the water errand. Water in a bowl shows you your own face, so the thing that quenches thirst also shows you who is thirsty. The lover who arrives from the well may be a reflection of the person who went looking.
The last line is the poem's quiet punch: "Coiling or uncoiling, / something always gets loose." The words "coiling" and "uncoiling" nearly mirror each other, as if the sound itself were winding and unwinding. Each can describe a snake, a potter's rope of clay, or a story being spun or unspun. "Loose" has several meanings here. A snake gets loose, a thread of plot slips its teller, and desire in these tales is never quite tidy. The poem does not say which one it means, and that fits, since it ends by acknowledging that making things, whether pots or stories, cannot be fully controlled.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only three loose tercets, and the lines vary in length. The longest, "You go for water & bring back a strange new lover," runs on like the thing it describes, while the first stanza is clipped and percussive. Sound does the work rhyme might have done. The "oo" sound threads through "you," "new," "used" and finally "loose," so the closing word echoes the poem's own vocabulary of strangers and storytelling. The ampersand adds a casual, handwritten feel, closer to a note jotted on a walk than to a formal statement.
What makes the poem significant is how much it fits into so little space. In nine lines it treats folk wisdom as a craft, links danger, desire and creation through the single image of the coil, and gives the "old wives" their authority back without sentimentality. It teaches a way of reading: listen to the rattle, notice the shape repeating from snake to clay to story, and accept that the meaning will never be fully contained.