Most poems about solitude make it sound either noble or tragic. Dave Bonta's "Hermetic" makes it sound like a routine. The speaker announces that it is "time to meet with the plaster and brick / that belong to my lodgings," as if the walls were an appointment to be kept. The words are dry and practical, but the final line gives the reason for the whole ritual: "being open might give longing a home." The central idea is that closing oneself in is a form of self-defence. The speaker shuts out the world because the world might let in a feeling he would rather not shelter.
The title sets this up. "Hermetic" means sealed so tightly that nothing can get in or out. It sounds like "hermit," and its older associations are with secrecy. The word describes the speaker's condition, but it also describes the poem, which is five lines closed around a single admission.
The sound of the language does quiet work here. In the first stanza the speaker's possessions are "plaster and brick," two hard, clipped words that make the house feel solid and unfeeling. Yet the verb is "belong," and it comes back in disguise in the last line. Hidden inside "belong" is the same stretch of sound that opens "longing," so the feeling the speaker wants to exclude is already in the vocabulary he used to describe his own home. "Lodgings" sits close by with a similar sound. It is also a modest, even temporary word, nearer to a rented room than a house. The speaker owns his walls, but he does not quite say he is at home.
That word "home" arrives only at the end, and it lands hard. By then the poem has been talking about shelter without naming it. Longing is imagined as something homeless, a stray that will settle in if the door is left ajar. The idea is gently comic and also sad. A person who keeps out longing because it might move in has admitted that he is very likely to feed it.
The form is as bare as the argument. There is no rhyme, no capital letter and no punctuation, so the poem has no full stops and nothing to mark where one thought is shut off from the next. Its stanzas fall into a pattern of two lines, two lines and one. The lines shrink from the long first line to the two short, near-identical lines of the second stanza: "quiet as the ground / I go shut my doors." Those lines are the smallest and stillest in the poem. The final line then stretches out to its fullest length, and its slow run of stressed words ("might give longing a home") feels like a held breath finally let go. The ending also has no full stop, so the poem fails to seal itself. It is a hermetic poem that leaves a little gap at the end.
The imagery is minimal but well chosen. "Quiet as the ground" is the poem's only simile, and it is an ambiguous one. The ground is silent and steady, and it lies beneath everything. The comparison may also suggest burial, though that is an inference rather than anything the poem says. Either way, the speaker wants to become that kind of presence, one that makes no demands and holds no hope. The casual phrase "I go shut my doors" is just as telling. Because the doors are plural, we imagine a whole series of closings, as if one door were never enough. The word "might" admits that the danger is only a possibility. The speaker is guarding against a risk, and that makes the shutting more anxious than confident.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about a contradiction most people recognise. We protect ourselves from wanting things because wanting hurts, but the protection costs us the very openness that makes life warm. Bonta does not resolve this. He does not tell us whether the speaker is wise or foolish, and the plain tone leaves us to decide. In five lowercase lines, the poem shows how a quiet evening ritual can hold a whole decision about how to live.