Desire, the poem suggests, has a birthday. It is born, celebrated, and, like any birthday, it comes round again. In seven short lines Dave Bonta moves from a gift to a ride to a bonfire, then closes with a quiet verdict: "We go off for the same joy / and return for trouble." What looks like a cheerful domestic anecdote turns out to be a small, sly study of how pleasure and danger travel together.
The first line, "The birthday of desire," repeats the title, so the poem seems to begin twice, like a toast before the story. It has no verb, only a label hung over what follows. Then the story starts in plain past tense: "My wife offered me a true horse / and I had great pleasure in riding." The tone is startlingly matter-of-fact. A horse is an odd present, and "true" is an odd word for it, as if other horses in this poem might be false or imagined. The sentence can be read literally, as a real horse and a real ride, or erotically, and the poem never chooses. "Great pleasure" is flat and slightly old-fashioned, and that understatement lets the suggestion do the work. It also matters that the gift comes from his wife. Desire here is at home and permitted, not illicit, which makes the trouble at the end more interesting, because nobody in the poem is a villain.
The colon after "riding" is the hinge. What follows is not more narrative but two images that seem to define the ride: "a house built high with two sticks, / a bonfire of guns." A house of two sticks is hardly a house. Two sticks might lean on each other, but they cannot enclose anything, and "built high" adds ambition to the flimsiness. It is tall and barely supported, which is one way to picture how desire feels from inside. The line is also built of heavy one-syllable words ("house built high with two sticks"), and they sit side by side like clumsy blocks.
The bonfire of guns pulls two ways. Burning weapons could mean disarmament, a festive giving-up of aggression. But guns in a fire are still guns, and the image carries a hint of things about to go off. The poem does not settle this, and I think it is meant to stay open. Both images are about making and unmaking, building and burning, and neither is explained. There is a faint sound-link too: "desire" in line one and "bonfire" in line five share an "-ire" ending, so fire is quietly present in the word for wanting.
The last two lines change both tense and pronoun. The past-tense "I" becomes a present-tense "we," and a private episode becomes a general habit. The phrase "go off" does double duty. It means setting out on a journey, but it is also what guns do, and coming straight after the bonfire it brings the weapon back into the sentence. "Return" is a verb of cycles and answers the birthday of the opening. The parallel phrasing, "for the same joy" and "for trouble," is neatly balanced, but the nouns are not equal. Joy is "the same," a definite, familiar thing we could name. Trouble has no article at all, bare and unbounded. We leave for something we know and come back with something we cannot measure.
Formally the poem is free verse. It has no rhyme scheme and no regular meter, and its lines run from about five to nine syllables. The rhythm is that of speech, closer to a plainly told remark than to song. Short lines and the absence of ornament give it a dry, almost proverbial tone, even though its images are strange. The poem takes a shape that looks like a riddle or a fragment of something older, though that is an impression from its manner and not a fact about its origins.
The poem is worth reading for how much it holds in so little space. It never lectures about desire. It offers a gift, a ride, a house that shouldn't stand and a fire that might be festival or danger, and then states the pattern in the plainest words available. The ending has no regret or moral, only the observation that we keep setting out for the same joy and keep coming back to trouble. The poem lets the reader feel the pull of the first and the weight of the second at once.