A city made of glass ought to be nothing but windows. Dave Bonta's «Sunset Boulevard» opens by denying exactly that: "In the glass city there are / no glass windows." It sounds like a riddle, but it has a logic. A window only exists because a wall interrupts transparency. If everything is see-through, nothing can be a window, because there is no opaque surface for it to be a gap in. Total transparency cancels itself out, and the city that should be the most open place imaginable offers no opening at all. The line break helps the trick. We read "there are" and wait for something to follow, and what arrives is an absence.
The poem then turns to its rulers, and the absence gets stranger. "The king is kin to his own nothing" is the most musical line, with its clipped k-sounds in "king" and "kin" that make the two words feel like relatives themselves. The king does not rule over nothing. He is related to it, and it belongs to him, "his own." Power has become a family inheritance of emptiness. The queen gets the opposite treatment: she is "a whole table." Where the king is a void, she is solid, domestic, even complete, since "whole" sets itself against "nothing." What kind of table, the poem never says. It might be a banquet, a gaming table, or a chessboard, and the royal pair suggests playing cards or chess pieces, though that is a reading rather than something the text states. Either way, the monarchs have been demoted into an absence and a piece of furniture.
Then comes the colon, which promises an explanation, and the poem delivers something that only pretends to be one: "so the difference between / gold and evening." The "so" claims a logical conclusion that nothing earlier has supplied. The sentence also never gets a verb. It stops at a fragment, a difference that is mentioned but never stated. The line break after "between" does what the word says, leaving a gap before "gold and evening" arrives. The final phrase falls softly, ending on the long, nasal sound of "evening" after the harder "gold."
The form is as spare as the content. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, just six short lines of free verse. The lengths still make a shape: the third line is the longest, at about nine syllables, and the poem then contracts toward its two-word finish. Sound ties the lines together where rhyme might have. "Glass" is repeated, then echoed by "gold." The k-sounds of "king," "kin" and "queen" run through the middle. The soft, rounded sounds of "whole," "gold" and "evening" close the poem. Everything is held together by echo rather than argument.
The title adds another layer. Sunset Boulevard is a real Los Angeles street, and for many readers the name brings up Hollywood, with its glitter, display and fame. The poem never mentions any of this, but judging by the imagery, that glamour is its target. A glass city, a king, a queen and gold are all symbols of splendour, and each is emptied out or made absurd. "Gold" and "evening" are also the two halves of a sunset, since the gold is the evening's light. So the poem's last gesture may be that the difference between them is almost nothing. The thing we prize as treasure is only a colour that light passes through on its way to dark.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so few words, and for how it makes the reader complete it. It does not lecture about vanity or the fragility of fame. It gives us a paradox, two impossible royals and an unfinished comparison, and leaves us to feel the unease for ourselves. Its logic is that of a dream, where things are plainly wrong and yet make a strange kind of sense. Like the city it describes, the poem is transparent on the surface and still hard to see through, and a poem that keeps its meaning just out of reach is worth rereading.