Six short lines, and a whole small catastrophe of embarrassment. Dave Bonta's "Indiscretion" catches the moment after someone has said too much, probably to a person who was not moved by it, and is left to inspect the damage. The title tells us how to read it. An indiscretion is a slip of judgment, and here the slip is made of words.
The first couplet sets the scene with a simile: "how like a fine frost / my prayers fall on her ear." The word "prayers" matters. The speaker doesn't say "words" or "pleas." He treats her as someone to be petitioned, almost worshipped, and her ear is where the petition lands. Frost is an odd image for something that fails to land, because it is delicate, silent and beautiful. It settles rather than strikes. But it is also cold, and it is gone by morning. So the simile holds two ideas at once: the prayers were light and tender, and they were met with chill and left no mark. "Fine" works twice as well. It means thin and powdery, but it also means lovely, which is what the speaker may have believed his words to be.
The second couplet is the knottiest, and its ambiguity seems to be the point. "what ingratitude / the poor words of a liar." Who is ungrateful, and who is the liar? One reading is that the speaker lashes out at her indifference, then turns on himself, calling his own speech "poor" and himself a liar. Another is that the phrase is her verdict on him, replayed in his head. The grammar won't settle. "What ingratitude" is an exclamation, yet the next line doesn't complete it. It hangs beside it, as if ingratitude simply *is* the poor words of a liar. With no punctuation anywhere in the poem, nothing marks where accusation ends and self-reproach begins. That blur suits a mind that can't tell whether it is angry at her or ashamed of itself. "Poor" blurs too, meaning both inadequate and pitiable.
The last couplet brings the title into focus: "words that should stay private / expressed in rust." "Expressed" has a double sense, since the words were said aloud but also pressed or squeezed out, as if against the speaker's better judgment. Then comes "rust," the surprise. We might expect ink or breath or voice. Rust is what happens to iron left out in damp air, so words "in rust" are corroded, flaking and stained. Judging by the imagery, they are also coarse, nothing like the shining thing the speaker meant to offer.
Frost and rust are cousins. Both are thin films laid on surfaces by weather and time. The sounds echo as well, since "frost" and "rust" share the same closing "-st," a near-chime that bookends the poem without making a true rhyme. The difference is that frost melts and rust stays. The first image describes what her ear does with the prayers, which is nothing. The last describes what the words have become. A quieter link runs between "prayers" and "private," which share their opening "pr." A prayer is private by nature, and the poem's shame lies in having made a private act public.
The form is spare. There are three couplets, no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. The lines run from four to seven syllables by my count (5, 6, 5, 7, 6, 4), with no regular beat, so the rhythm sounds like thought rather than song. The final line is the shortest and ends on a hard, clipped word, like a door closing.
The poem is worth reading because it compresses a very common feeling, the wince of having confessed too much, into three physical images, and because it never says what was confessed or to whom. It withholds the very thing it is about. A poem on the subject of indiscretion turns out to be thoroughly discreet, and that restraint leaves us with the speaker's discomfort and nothing to explain it away.