Most stories about treasure end with someone digging it up. Dave Bonta's "Default" opens by leaving it exactly where it is: "We let treasure rest— / sun on fish." In six short lines, the poem sketches a way of living that turns down the usual prizes and settles for something plainer, and perhaps sturdier.
The dash in the first line works as a hinge. What follows it explains the treasure, and the explanation is modest: not gold but sunlight on fish, a silver flash that looks like coinage but can't be pocketed. "Rest" is the key word. The treasure rests, the light rests on the fish, and the people watching rest from wanting. The pronoun "we" is plural and unexplained, so the reader is drawn into the agreement before knowing quite what has been agreed.
Then the tone turns domestic and a little grim. "We breakfast on trouble" makes a verb of a meal, and the meal is difficulty rather than toast. Breakfast is the breaking of a fast, so there is a dry joke here: trouble is what we reliably get first thing in the morning. Set beside the opening, it creates a reversal. The beautiful thing is left alone, while the hard thing is eaten and taken in. "Continue in absence" is more elusive. Whose absence, and absence of what? The poem never says, and that refusal is part of its temper. Life goes on without needing the gap filled.
The title earns its place here. "Default" has several lives. In computing it is the setting that holds when nobody changes anything. In finance it means failing to pay what is owed. In law, someone who doesn't turn up ("in absence") can lose by default. The poem brushes against all of these through unspent treasure, endured absence and a baseline way of being. Each sense is a kind of not-doing, and the poem recasts that not-doing as a position rather than a failure.
There is no end rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are uneven, with the first two clipped and the middle ones lengthening as the list of verbs grows. Sound does the binding instead. The *f* of "fish" returns in "breakfast," "fox" and "fool," tying the treasure that is left alone to the temptations that are refused. "Treasure" and "trouble" share an opening, as if the poem were pairing the two things we most often chase or flee. In the last two lines "no," "so" and "go" chain together like an internal rhyme, and the long *o* sound carries us forward to the ending. "Fox and fool" names two opposite bad counsellors. Judging by the images, the fox stands for the cunning shortcut and the fool for plain folly, and the speakers decline both.
The final line is the longest in meaning. "And so" is the poem's only logical connective, which suggests the earlier refusals add up to a conclusion. That conclusion is "go knitting," a well-chosen emblem. Knitting is slow and repetitive, built from loops in which each stitch holds the last, and it makes something warm out of a single thread. It is the opposite of treasure-hunting, because there is no jackpot, only small acts piling up. Then comes the colon and "to be," an infinitive left hanging without a complement. It echoes Hamlet's famous phrase, but with the question removed. Here being is no dilemma. The grammar allows two readings: we knit in order to be, or knitting is simply what being looks like.
What makes the poem worth reading is that tone of steady acceptance. It is neither cheerful nor despairing. Trouble and absence are admitted into the morning, yet the poem doesn't wallow in them. In a handful of words it overturns the usual idea of value and asks whether a good life might be one that lets the gleam be, takes in what is hard, and keeps its hands busy. "Default" ends up sounding less like a fall-back than a choice, quietly made and repeated, one stitch after another.