In a mere thirteen words, Dave Bonta's "Full figure" fits a journey, a small joke and a quiet theory about music. Read as a single sentence, it says that with a fiddle the speaker gets partway home, and with a bass goes the rest of the way, which ends in bed. The instruments work like stages of a trip, or like gears. The title explains why. In music a "figure" is a short, recurring pattern, and in art it is a body. A "full figure" is therefore a complete sound and a complete shape. The fiddle supplies only the high, bright part. The bass adds the low foundation, and with both in place the picture is whole. The central idea seems to be that arrival needs the low note as well as the high one. Home here is not just a door but a lying-down, the point where the day's tune settles into silence.
The poem builds this idea into its shape. The most obvious move is the break in "part- / way." The word is cut mid-journey, with a hyphen hanging at the line's edge, so the poem stops "partway" in the very act of saying it. The next line, "way home," is only two syllables long, the shortest in the poem, as if the walk trails off. Then comes the stanza break, a white gap that can be read as the pause before the bass enters. The second stanza begins with "and a bass," a fragment that sounds like a new player stepping in and adding to what is already there.
The syntax is quietly clever too. In the first stanza the speaker is present: "I go." In the second, the "I" vanishes, and we get "go to bed," with no subject at all. Perhaps the speaker is so close to sleep that the self has already dropped away. Or the line can almost be heard as an instruction, a bass-heavy lullaby telling the listener to go to bed. The poem doesn't settle this, and the ambiguity suits it.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run four, three, two, three and three syllables, so the poem contracts and then steadies. Sound does the work that rhyme usually would. "Fiddle" is quick and light, with its short *i* and the flick of *d* and *l*. The second stanza is heavier. "Go," "home" and "go" repeat a long, rounded *o*, a vowel you can almost hum, and "bass" and "bed" both begin with a blunt *b*, like a plucked low string. The last word, "bed," lands flat and low, the way a bass note sits at the bottom of a chord.
The imagery is minimal, but the instruments carry a great deal. To many ears a fiddle suggests dancing, company and walking tunes, which fits the first half of the trip, when the evening is still lively. A bass belongs to the body of the music and to the night. The poem doesn't say whether it means a double bass, a bass guitar or even a bass voice, and that openness lets readers hear whichever they like. There is also a gentle comedy in the picture of a person trailing a huge instrument toward bed. That fits the title, since a bass is a "full figure" in the plainest sense, a big, curved, body-like thing.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts us. It gives no scene, no named place and no explanation, only two instruments and two destinations. We are left to notice that the fiddle is the smaller thing and gets us only so far, while the bass takes us to the end. The poem does the same itself. It starts out thin and high, with a fiddle and a broken word, and ends up low and complete, ready for sleep. A reader can finish it in seconds, but it is hard to forget that music can be a way of getting home as well as something to listen to.