Nothing, in Dave Bonta's poem, turns out to be surprisingly well stocked. The title promises an abstraction, something philosophical and bottomless, and the first line seems to deliver it: "Nothing but water and the half moon." Yet look at what that "nothing" contains. Water. A moon. It is a sparse scene, perhaps a night shoreline, though the poem never says where we are. The phrase "nothing but" announces lack while describing something rather beautiful, and the poem leaves open whether this emptiness is a grand view or a bleak one. The half moon suits that uncertainty. It is neither dark nor full, a light only partly there, an image of incompleteness that matches the title.
Then the poem swerves from statement to request: "Give us wine / and anchovies / and many strange evasions / to life and bed." The phrase "Give us" has the grammar of prayer and recalls "Give us this day our daily bread," but what is asked for is not bread. It is wine and a salty little fish. The word "us" matters too. The speaker is not alone at the water's edge, and the plea is made on behalf of a company. That makes the loneliness shared, and the tone warmer and a little funnier.
The humour lives in the anchovies. After a line of cosmic austerity, the poem drops to something tiny, salty and specific. Anchovies are a humble food and an acquired taste, and they come out of the very water the first line called empty. They also make you thirsty, which sends you back to the wine, and wine is itself water made into something more. So the poem does not deny the water. It asks for water improved, with appetite as its reply to the void.
The final lines are the strangest. "Evasions" usually means escaping from something, so we might expect "evasions of life." Instead the poem says "evasions / to life and bed," and the small word "to" changes the direction. Read one way, life and bed are what we are dodging. Read the other way, they are where the evasions lead, and that reading is the more interesting. If nothingness is what we flee, then life itself is the escape route. "Bed" stays deliberately flexible: it could mean sleep, desire, simple rest, or even, by suggestion, the last bed of all. The poem declines to choose. "Many" and "strange" suggest that no single remedy will do. What we need is a whole inventive repertoire of dodges, none of them dignified.
The construction supports this. The lines run to roughly nine syllables, then three, four, seven and four. There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The opening line closes on two heavy stresses, "half moon," like a door shutting on the scene, and what follows is short, quick and slightly breathless. The repeated "and" at the start of lines three and four makes the wishes stack up, as though the speaker keeps thinking of more things to ask for as they speak. Sound links the poem quietly. The long "i" of "wine" returns in "life," tying the drink to the thing it serves. The soft hissing of "us," "anchovies," "strange" and "evasions" is faintly watery, so the sea never quite leaves the poem even after it has left the landscape.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it handles a very large subject. Poems about nothingness often respond with solemnity or despair. This one does not argue with the void. It simply orders dinner. In five lines it moves from an abstract title to concrete foods, from observation to appeal, and from a single image to a crowd of "strange evasions." The implied claim is modest but persuasive: meaning may be less something we find than something we improvise, with wine, salt, company and a bed to fall into.
The ending also seems fitting. After "bed" there is nothing more, and the poem stops as abruptly as the half moon is cut off. It leaves us with the same lopsided, unfinished light that it began with, and with a strong sense of what we would like to have in hand.