Night, in Dave Bonta's "Looking back," does not simply fall. It calls, and the speaker answers by being returned "to myself," as if the self were a place he had wandered away from during the day. What he finds there is "an earful of old pain." The word "earful" is well chosen. In everyday speech it means a scolding, a long complaint you can't get away from. So the past here is not a quiet memory but something that talks at him, loudly, once the distractions of daylight are gone. The title points the same way: looking back is something the poem does and also something that is done to the speaker.
The second couplet turns from this inner noise to an oddly practical image. "Two loves have I / and only one pocket." The inverted word order, "have I" instead of "I have," sounds like old song or love poetry, a formal and slightly romantic register. Then the line drops into the ordinary object of a pocket. The collision is the joke, and also the ache. A pocket is small, private and close to the body, the place for a key, a coin or a smooth stone. By turning love into something you carry, the poem makes the problem physical: there is not room for both. The poem never says who or what the two loves are, and that openness is a strength. They could be two people, or a person and a way of life, or a past love and a present one. Judging by the poem's title and opening, they may be bound up with what the speaker is remembering, but the text doesn't confirm it.
The last couplet is the strangest: "arson is a pretty house / with ingenious chemistry." It follows no logical bridge from what came before, and the poem gains energy from that gap. The sentence is built like a definition, as if the speaker were explaining a word, and it describes a crime in the language of admiration. "Pretty" is a startling word for a house in flames, and "ingenious chemistry" treats combustion as clever craftsmanship. The phrase also carries a second meaning. "Chemistry" is what people say about attraction between lovers, so the fire may be the other face of the two loves in the previous lines. Read this way, arson is what happens when feeling has nowhere to go: if you cannot keep both loves, perhaps you burn the house down. The poem lets that reading hover without insisting on it. The speaker might be tempted by destruction, or might just be admiring it from a distance, and the cool tone leaves us unsure which.
The form helps create this unease. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, which gives the poem the feel of a thought half-spoken in the dark. Each couplet closes without a full stop, so the three statements sit side by side like separate entries in a notebook, and the reader has to make the connections. The sound shifts too. The first four lines are short and mostly built from one-syllable words: "night calls me to myself," "two loves have I." The final couplet stretches into longer, more elaborate words, "ingenious" and "chemistry," and the lines are the longest in the poem. The language grows more polished just as the content grows more dangerous, so the speaker seems to relish the very thing he describes.
The poem is significant for how much it leaves unsaid in so few words. It moves from hearing pain, to feeling the limits of what one can hold, to imagining a beautiful and terrible release, without explaining any of the steps. For students, it is a useful example of how images can do the work of argument. A pocket, a house and a chemical reaction replace long explanations of regret and desire. It also shows that looking back is not always gentle nostalgia. Sometimes it is a crowded, noisy room, and the mind starts looking for a match.