Seven short lines, and a whole morning gets overturned. Dave Bonta's "Muse" tells of a man who meets a woman, listens to her, and never makes it back to work. It is a joke, a love poem and a small manifesto at once, and the title explains how. The muse, traditionally the source of a poet's inspiration, appears here not as a goddess on a mountain but as a woman encountered on an ordinary morning, whose power lies entirely in how she speaks.
The first word that matters is "taken." "This morning I was taken / with a comely woman." We expect "taken with" to mean charmed, but the line break lets "taken" stand alone for a moment, and in that pause it sounds like being seized or carried off. The speaker is passive, something happens to him. That sets up the poem's central idea: real inspiration is not chosen, it overpowers you, and the everyday life you were supposed to be living gets pushed aside.
The description that follows is oddly precise about what it refuses to praise. She is "comely," an old, modest word for pleasant-looking, and then the speaker corrects himself: "not handsome." Beauty of the face is mentioned only to be set aside. What he really wants to say comes next: "a woman of the best language / that ever I heard any / in my life." The phrase "a woman of the best language" is strange and rather wonderful. We say a woman "of" a place or a family, so here she seems to belong to language, or be made of it. The muse is a voice rather than a body.
The syntax adds to the effect. "That ever I heard any" is twisted, with the "I" pushed ahead of the verb, and it ends on a dangling "any." Judging by the diction, the speaker sounds like someone from an older kind of English, an impression the poem never explains. The piled-up superlative, "the best… that ever… in my life," is the language of someone too astonished to be tidy. The speaker is trying to praise good speech and keeps stumbling over his own sentences, which is quietly funny.
The rhythm follows the same pattern. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, just the unforced cadence of someone telling a story. But the lines grow shorter as the sentence runs on: the two long lines about the woman give way to "that ever I heard any," and then to the tiny "in my life." The sentence seems to run out of breath, as if the speaker were remembering how overwhelmed he felt.
Then comes the turn, and a change of register. "I took leave to go to the office" brings in the plainest, most bureaucratic setting imaginable. "Took leave" works two ways: he asked permission to go, and he said goodbye. Notice too that "I was taken" has become "I took," so the speaker seems to regain some control. The last line takes it away again: "and could not return." It does not say "did not." The verb "could" suggests a compulsion, not a decision. The sound reinforces this, because "took" and "could" share the same vowel and the same hard k, so the second seems to answer the first and close the trap.
The poem stops there, with no punctuation drama and no explanation of where he went or what he did instead. That silence is where the poem is most interesting. The reader can fill it in: he stayed to listen, or followed the voice, or went off to write. It is a fair inference that the poem itself is what he did instead of going back to work, the evidence that he really was taken.
What makes "Muse" worth reading is how much it does with so little. It sets language against employment, and it argues, without raising its voice, that a voice can matter more than a job. It also redefines what a muse is. She is not a distant ideal but a stranger whose way of talking changes your day. In seven lines Bonta makes inspiration sound like what it probably feels like: an interruption you cannot refuse.