Most wills divide up a house, some savings, a few good chairs. Dave Bonta's "Bequest" hands out a day, a sun and a sea. It borrows the commanding voice of a last testament ("Give... give... Give...") and uses it for things nobody can own. The effect is strange and playful, and also a little grand. A speaker who can bequeath noon must, in some sense, have possessed it.
The first gift is the most puzzling: "Give the day my made-up noon." Normally a day contains its noon, so the day has no need of one from us. Here the speaker's noon is "made-up," and the phrase works two ways. It is invented, a noon from the imagination. It also suggests something dressed up, like a face with make-up on. Either way, the day gets a noon that is personal and a little artificial, as if the speaker had been privately running the clock. The second line goes further: "give dinner to the sun." This reverses the usual order, so that the sun, the thing that feeds everything, is the one being fed. It also fits the hour. Dinner comes as the sun is going down, so the line quietly moves us from midday toward evening. The sounds help: "noon," "dinner" and "sun" share a soft, humming *n* that gives the opening lines a drowsy warmth.
Then the poem's grammar changes. The word "Give" begins the first three lines, but after "Give the apothecary / the use of the sea" it vanishes. An apothecary is an old word for a pharmacist, someone who mixes remedies. Handing such a figure "the use of the sea" invites us to think of the sea as a medicine cabinet, full of salt, weed and brine, with a cure in every wave. The line break after "sea" matters here. It leaves the word hanging at the end of the line, and the next line picks it up again: "and the sea, my velvet coat."
That last line can be read in two ways, and the poem doesn't choose between them. It may be a final gift, "give the sea my velvet coat," so that the ocean is clothed by the speaker. Or the comma may make "my velvet coat" a renaming of the sea, as though the sea were the coat. The second reading is the more striking. Velvet is soft, heavy and dark, and its surface changes when you run a hand across it. That is how a night sea looks, shifting and shadowed. A coat also wraps and warms. Seen this way, the speaker has been wearing the sea all along. The bequest ends with something that was never fully given away, only shared.
The poem has no end rhyme and no strict meter. Its lines are short, usually three or four beats, and they fall into the plain rhythm of speech. The structure carries the poem instead. The three repeated "Give" lines build a ritual, almost like a chant, and dropping the verb at the end makes the last line feel like a landing. There is also a loose arc of time across the five lines, from noon to dinner to the dark of the sea. The poem passes through a whole day in a few seconds.
Its significance lies in how much it manages with so little. "Bequest" suggests, without ever saying so, that a will usually implies an ending, since we write one when we expect to leave. Yet the speaker gives away only things that never run out: daylight, the sun, the ocean. Nothing in the poem tells us the speaker is dying, and that restraint is what lets it work. The poem is a small act of generosity and also a boast. It treats the whole world as the speaker's to give, and then shows how soft and strange that ownership is, like a velvet coat that is also a sea.