Few poems get so much out of a title. "In practice" can mean "in reality," as opposed to theory. It can also mean "while rehearsing," and it can suggest the working life of a doctor or a believer. Bonta's first line uses the second sense: "I practice loss." We usually practise skills we want to get good at, like scales or free throws, so the verb makes loss sound like a discipline, something we might rehearse until it hurts less. The poem then asks whether that is possible.
The simile that follows is oddly tangled. The speaker is "lousy as a fool in / the king's favor." "Lousy" first reads as "bad at it," a confession of failure. But "lousy with" is also an idiom for being overloaded with something, as in lousy with money. A fool who has the king's favor is lousy with luck, and the line quietly contradicts itself: the speaker is either hopeless at loss or swimming in it. The court fool is a good figure for this. He is licensed to joke, safe only while the king is pleased, and always one mood swing from disaster. His position is comic and precarious at once, much like the speaker's.
The fool is "leaving / his things in / an open grave," and here the king and the grave bring Hamlet's graveyard scene to mind. That is an inference from the imagery, not a claim about the poet's intentions, but the echo of a jester, a king and an open grave fits so closely that it is hard to ignore. The line breaks do more than the allusion, though. Two lines end on the same small word, "in," and both leave a preposition hanging with nowhere to land until the next line. The reader's eye drops down the page as if into the hole. "Things" is the vaguest noun available. It could be belongings, keepsakes or burdens. The poem never says whether the fool is paying tribute, being careless or letting go on purpose, and that refusal keeps the image open.
Then the poem turns, and the turn is its best move. "Strange to hear all / the murderers of a pint / part for home." The scene moves from court and cemetery to a pub at closing time. "Murder a pint" is an informal phrase for drinking one down fast. Bonta takes the dead metaphor literally, so a room of ordinary drinkers becomes a crowd of killers, and the language of death slips into a cheerful, everyday setting. The mood is dark but amused, which suits the fool. "Strange to hear" also changes the sense we are using. Until now the poem has been visual, with its king, grave and things. Now it is about sound: voices, scraping chairs, goodnights drifting off down the street.
Departure is the thread that ties the halves together. The fool is "leaving"; the drinkers "part." The two words are close in meaning, and "part" also puns on the idea of a part of something being taken away. The last word, "home," sounds comforting, yet after the grave it could carry a darker echo. Judging by the imagery, the poem lets the reader hear both, though it never forces the second.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has eight short lines, no end rhyme and no punctuation except two full stops. The rhythm is loose and conversational, with roughly two or three strong beats a line, and the line breaks cut across the syntax, so it keeps hesitating and nearly tripping. The sound patterns are subtle. "Loss" and "lousy" share their opening sound and echo each other's vowels, so the failure is bound to the thing practised. The *p* of "practice," "pint" and "part" runs from the start of the poem to its end, a soft percussive tap, like glasses set down on a bar.
What makes this small poem worth reading is its tact. It does not announce grief or console. It suggests that we rehearse loss all the time in unremarkable ways, by leaving things behind, by hearing a room empty out, and that the rehearsal never quite makes us expert. We stay a little foolish and a little lousy at it, and we go home anyway.