Ask someone to define a kiss and you'll probably get a fumble, or a shrug, or a blush. Dave Bonta's "The Kiss" turns that difficulty into its method. It poses the question in the first line and then answers it eight times, never with a straight definition. The kiss arrives as clothing, a meal, a stroll, a pain, a royal visit, a school subject and, finally, a disappearance. The central idea is that a kiss can't be pinned down by explanation. It can only be circled, and each answer shows a different side of it.
The structure is a riddle turned upside down. Normally a riddle hides its answer and makes us guess. Here the answer, "kiss," is given in the title and the first line, and the real puzzle is what the answers have to do with it. Five of the eight answers begin with the indefinite article ("A pair," "A light," "A pleasant," "A fine," "A good"), which gives the poem a chant-like, almost nursery-rhyme steadiness. Two of the others switch to "The" ("The king's coming," "The absence of I"), and both are the grandest, least ordinary answers. The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, and it doesn't need them. The repeated "A" supplies the rhythm, and the lines are short enough to land like small, separate beats.
The images move between the physical and the impossible. "A pair of silk stockings" is the most tangible: it brings texture, closeness and a slightly old-fashioned intimacy, and the soft hiss of *silk* and *stockings* echoes the hiss of *kiss*. Then comes "A light blue supper," which can't be literal. Colour is attached to a meal, and *light* works two ways, as pale and as not heavy. The phrase asks us to feel a kiss as something tasted and seen at once, delicate and a little wistful. "A pleasant walk" brings us back to earth with a plain, mild phrase, as if the poem were catching its breath.
The turn comes with "A fine pain." The oxymoron is the poem's emotional centre. *Fine* can mean excellent or delicate, and the near-echo of *fine* and *pain* in sound makes the two words feel bound together. Anyone who has wanted something badly will recognise the ache of wanting, which is part of what a kiss means. Next, "The king's coming" shifts the tone to anticipation and ceremony. A kiss, like a royal arrival, can seem to change the room, make everyone straighten up, and leave the ordinary world waiting. Because the article is "The," the king feels like a specific, expected figure, which adds to the sense of occasion.
Then the poem makes a joke, and it works because of what surrounds it. "A good foundation for Latin" drops the kiss into the schoolroom. It is deliberately absurd, and also a nice sideways glance. Latin has words for kissing, and English still borrows from them in words like *osculate*. But the line is mostly comic relief. It reminds us that the poem is not pompous, and that a kiss can be funny and a bit silly as well as grand. The bathos makes the final line hit harder.
That last line, "The absence of I," is the poem's quiet masterstroke. In grammar, *I* is the pronoun of the self, and the thought is that in a kiss the self briefly disappears, merging into "we" or into nothing at all. The poem also enacts this. The word *I* never appears in it. There is no speaker saying what he or she feels, only a series of impersonal, offered-up images. The poem ends on a single letter that it has been quietly avoiding all along, and that is what *absence* amounts to here.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does in so few words. It treats an overfamiliar subject without sentimentality and without a single cliché. It lets humour, longing and awe sit side by side, and it suggests that definitions fail where experience is strongest. For a student reader, it is also a handy lesson in how a list can build to a meaning. The order of the items matters, and by the end the poem has gone from stockings to selflessness.