Dave Bonta's "Pilgrimage" is five lines long, and none of them describes walking. The pilgrim lies still, thinks of a woman's face, drifts through a vast and strange church, and finally wakes to urinate. The poem's central idea is that devotion and the body can't be separated. Whatever holy journey the title promises, it happens in a sleeper's head and ends at the needs of a bladder. The poem doesn't sneer at the sacred. It lets the sacred and the ordinary occupy the same small space.
The opening line sets a slow, steady pace: "I lie alone, mind on her face." The long vowels in "lie," "alone," "mind" and "face" make it feel drawn out, like someone staring at a ceiling in the dark. "Mind on her face" works like a compass needle fixed on one point, which suits a pilgrim, since a pilgrim has a destination. Here the destination is a person. The poem never says who she is, and that silence matters. She could be a lover or a sacred figure, and the poem seems comfortable with the ambiguity, as if longing and worship were spoken in the same voice. "Lie" is also a quiet pun. In a chancel, where tombs and effigies are often found, it is how the dead are laid out, and it suggests the speaker is a little like one of them.
The middle lines are where the imagery takes over. "In the church chancel, the mouth of a whale" has no verb, only a comma that sets one thing beside another: the holiest part of the church is the open jaws of an animal. A building meant to protect becomes something that swallows. The poem never names Jonah, but the reader may think of him, and "bigger than bad weather" supports that reading. The phrase is colloquial and almost comic. The speaker says "bad weather," not "storm" or "tempest," which shrinks a biblical terror to something you'd mention at a bus stop. The plosive b's in "bigger" and "bad" give the line some weight, and the claim itself is reassuring. The huge space is more than the storm outside, so it can shelter the sleeper even while it frightens him.
Then comes the strangest line: "I keep myself in the open." "Keep" sounds like keeping a vow, or keeping a watch, or keeping an animal, and it makes openness a discipline. The line sits oddly after the whale, since the speaker is inside a vast mouth and yet claims to be exposed. I read this as a contradiction the poem wants us to feel. Being sheltered and being vulnerable happen together, and the speaker chooses to stay receptive instead of closing himself off. Whether "the open" means unroofed ground or an unguarded heart, the poem doesn't say.
The final line, "wake to piss," is the real turn. It is the first sign that the speaker has been asleep, and it recasts the whale and the church as half-dream, which explains the leaps between images. The drop in register is sudden. The words are blunt monosyllables, and the vocabulary shifts from the cathedral-like to the crude. "Wake" still carries its spiritual sense of awakening, a vigil, but what the speaker wakes into is plumbing. The poem keeps both meanings alive and lets neither cancel the other.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only lines of uneven length that read like spoken fragments. The punctuation thins as the poem goes: a full stop after the first line, a comma after the second, and then nothing at all. The poem ends without a period, leaving it open in the same way the speaker keeps himself open.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much with so little. It takes a word heavy with tradition, "pilgrimage," and tests it against a body that is lonely, half-asleep and in need of the toilet. The poem doesn't make a joke of the sacred, because the whale and the storm stay vivid to the end. What it does is honest. Even the most elevated longing has to be carried by a human being who gets up in the night.