Four short lines, and all they hold is a body, a moon and some water, yet the poem keeps humming long after the reading is over. Dave Bonta's "Resonance" is built like the thing it names: one line is struck, and the rest is the sound that lingers.
The strike comes first. "at night a body begins to ring" borrows a verb we usually reserve for bells, telephones and ears, and applies it to a whole body, as if a person were a glass tapped with a spoon. The poem never says what does the tapping. Night is simply when the ringing becomes audible, perhaps because everything else has gone quiet, perhaps because the dark makes us listen inward. "Begins" matters too, because it suggests a process that has started but has not finished. The phrasing is also impersonal. It says "a body," not "my body," which gives the line the cool tone of a physics lesson. That fits the title, since resonance is what happens when an object vibrates in answer to some outside frequency. If a body is ringing, something out there must be sounding the note.
The second stanza offers a candidate. After the white space, the poem finally says "I." That small capital letter, arriving after a lowercase opening with no punctuation, makes the first line feel as if it drifted in from the middle of the night, and the speaker only steps forward once the sound has been established. "I love a cold moon" is plain and almost blunt, made of short words. "Cold moon" may also recall the folk name for a winter full moon, though the poem itself only needs the chill. The moon is loved, but it is not a warm or comforting object.
The last two lines complicate that love. "it being dangerous to walk / on water" is a slightly formal, explaining construction, and it leaves the reader wondering what exactly is being explained. Is the love caused by the danger? Or does "it" lean back toward the moon, which really is a hazard when its light lays a bright, walkable-looking path across a lake? Cold also hints at ice, and judging by the imagery, thin ice is a plausible reading, since the poem links frozen water to a hazard and to sound. The phrase "walk on water" carries an older echo as well, the miracle of someone crossing a surface that should not hold them. Here the miracle has become a warning. The line break adds to this effect. "to walk" sits safely at the end of a line for a moment, and then "on water" arrives and the ground gives way.
What connects the two stanzas is never stated, and that gap is where the poem's resonance happens. One possible bridge is that the moon moves the tides and a body is mostly water, so a ringing body might be answering the moon. That is an inference, not something the text confirms, but the poem seems to invite it. The attraction the speaker feels is physical before it is reasoned, and it is tangled up with risk.
The sound of the language supports this. The first line moves in four fairly even beats, like a pulse or a hammer-stroke, and its ending is all humming consonants: "begins," "ring." Nothing rhymes, and the second stanza loosens into the rhythm of ordinary speech. Even so, the long vowels and soft nasals of "cold moon" and "love" keep a faint ringing going, while the hard "w" sounds of "walk" and "water" give the ending a slight ripple.
The poem is significant because it trusts the reader. It offers no explanation and no tidy moral, only two images placed close together so that each sets the other vibrating. In a few lines it holds both tenderness and danger, and it shows that a poem can work by echo rather than by saying everything outright. It also ends without a full stop, so the ringing never quite stops.