Sixteen words, and a whole evening has already tipped over. Dave Bonta's "Lush life" gives us one drink, one sudden change of place, and one strange final image, and then it stops. The poem is about what drinking does to a person's sense of space. After the first gin the speaker is no longer simply sitting somewhere. He has been moved into a colder, tighter, darker world.
The title sets up the irony. "Lush" suggests abundance, something green and overflowing, and it is also slang for a heavy drinker. Both meanings are in play, but the poem delivers nothing abundant. Instead of plenty we get "the ice" and "a sack," two images of cold and confinement. The promise of a rich life shrinks to something frozen, then bagged and closed. That gap between title and body is the poem's central idea: the pleasure advertised by the drink and the condition it actually produces are not the same thing.
The construction is very economical. Every word is a single syllable, which gives the poem a clipped, almost flat delivery, like someone reporting what has happened without the energy to decorate it. The lines grow and then fall away: three syllables in "The first gin," seven in "and here I am in the ice," six in "Here is night in a sack." There is no rhyme, but there is a lot of sound-play. The short *i* of "first," "gin" and "in" is picked up by the long *i* of "I," "ice" and "night," so the vowels seem to slide from one sound to the other. This may be a small echo of the way a drink slides a person from one state into another. The last line ends on "sack," a hard, closing consonant that works like a drawstring pulled tight.
The repeated "here" is also important. "Here I am" and "Here is" sound like announcements, as if the speaker were surprised to find himself arriving somewhere. But the grammar changes between the two. In line two the subject is "I," in line three it is "night," and the speaker disappears. The poem moves from a self located in a place to a world described without anyone in it, which is a quiet way of showing how drink can erase the person drinking.
Then there is the "and" that opens the second line. It treats the leap from "the first gin" to "the ice" as immediate and automatic, with no gap between cause and effect. The word "first" suggests more drinks to come, so we may be watching the start of a longer slide. The poem gives us only the beginning, and the reader supplies the rest.
The imagery is compact and open to several readings. "In the ice" could be the cold of the glass, since gin is clear and often served with ice, and the speaker may feel as if he has shrunk and fallen into it. It could also describe the numbness alcohol brings, or the feeling of being stuck and frozen. "Night in a sack" is odder still. A sack can hold something captured or something bought, so night becomes a possession the speaker has been handed, perhaps the way a bottle comes wrapped in a paper bag. The word also recalls "hit the sack," meaning to go to bed, so the line may be about sleep, or about the blackout that comes before it. "Sack" is also an old word for a kind of wine, though the poem doesn't tell us whether that meaning is intended. What holds these readings together is the sense of darkness being packed up and contained, the vast turned small.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it neither scolds nor celebrates. It does not tell us drinking is bad or glamorous. It simply reports a change in the speaker's surroundings and leaves the reader with a chill. A poem this short can't explain itself, so each image has to do double work, and here the cold, the dark and the enclosure all point the same way. The title promises a lush life, and the three lines show it narrowing to a bag of night.