Somebody has made everything look pretty, and somebody else has paid for it. That uneasy bargain sits at the centre of Dave Bonta's "Tableaux," a poem of eight short lines that reads like a guided tour through a gallery whose exhibits turn out to be ordinary life. A tableau is a staged, motionless scene, people arranged to look like a picture. The title warns us what is coming: lives seen through a frame, held still and slightly falsified. The poem never says who is speaking or where the road leads, so the meaning has to be pieced together from the words. What emerges is an idea about distance. The further you travel from home, the more the world turns into scenery, and the more that scenery costs you the people who make it real.
The opening couplet shows how the poem works. "Prettily done for the common way" is faintly patronising. "Prettily" is how you might praise a child's drawing, and "the common way" could mean the ordinary path, the ordinary traveller, or the ordinary manner of doing things. Everything has been smoothed over for the average passer-by. Then comes the drop: "the road cost me my wife." Every word in that line has one syllable, and after the ornamental "prettily" the bluntness is startling. The verb "cost" turns the journey into a transaction, as if the speaker had paid for his view with a marriage. Whether she died, left, or was simply left behind, the poem doesn't say. Its silence feels deliberate, since the loss is stated as flatly as a price.
The second couplet turns to her, and the line break does something clever. "who has a mind" could be a complete thought, meaning she is intelligent and thinks for herself, before the next line adds "to understand each window." Read straight through, it becomes the idiom "has a mind to": she intends to, she is inclined to. Both readings work. Both seem to set her against the glossy road, since she is the one who wants to understand each frame rather than pass it. The windows do double duty. They are the panes of houses glimpsed from outside, and they are the borders of pictures. Judging by the imagery, the speaker looks at lit rooms and sees paintings.
Then the poem starts pointing. "here is the terrestrial / here painted as life." The repeated "here" is the voice of a guide or showman, and the grand, Latinate "terrestrial," so far from the plain speech of the opening, sounds like a label on a museum wall. The earth itself has become an exhibit. "Painted as life" is the sharpest phrase in the poem because its grammar admits the trick: this is not life but life's likeness. The sound seems to know it too. "Life" rhymes with "wife" from two couplets earlier, the only true rhyme in a poem otherwise free of it, so that the person lost and the picture that imitates her chime across the gap.
The last couplet changes the setting: "here at home people sit up longer / before their ash." This is the third "here," and now the word points to a house rather than a gallery. "Sit up" can mean to stay awake, to keep a vigil beside the dying, or simply to sit upright rather than lie down, and the poem leaves all three open. "Ash" is where "terrestrial" ends, earth reduced to its remains, and the line break leaves "before their ash" hanging. The comparison is deliberately unfinished. People at home last longer, or watch longer, or wait longer, but the destination is the same. Home is not an escape from mortality, only a place where the waiting is done in company.
The poem is worth reading for how much it carries in so little. There are no capital letters and no punctuation, so the lines slide into one another like a row of windows passed one after another, and the poem ends on "ash" without a full stop, as though the tour simply continues. The form also resists any single reading, and it seems to know that. The poem suggests that framing life as a pretty picture means losing something, and that what the frame leaves out is the lived, mortal business going on in the lit rooms behind the glass.