Every child has heard the rule: no sweets before supper, or you'll spoil your appetite. Dave Bonta's "The Yellow Field" takes that small domestic warning and lets it come true on a far larger scale. The speaker has lost the appetite, "all of it," and the rest of the poem discovers what grows in the space where hunger used to be.
The opening is chatty, like a family story told over drinks. Two grandmothers stand side by side: the "strict Nanna" who rations the sweets, and the other grandma who lights a cigarette and shoos the children outdoors so she and grandpa can enjoy their "cocktail hour." The phrase "critical hour" is quietly double-edged. It is the stretch before supper, but it also sounds decisive, as if something important is being lost. The grown-ups have appetites of their own, the cigarette and the cocktail, while the children's are policed. The aside "– ah! –" lets us hear the grandmother's relief.
Then the poem contracts to two lines: "Peace without children, yellow field / where I dissolve, finally, into a murmur of bees." After seven loose lines the sudden compression feels like a door clicking shut. The peace was the grandparents', but the speaker now claims it, and being sent outside begins to look like a gift. The soft *m* and *b* sounds of "murmur of bees" are close to a hum, and the verb "dissolve" prepares for the poem's chemistry.
The longest stanza is the strangest and best. "Given" repeats like the opening of a geometry proof: given water, given ice, given minerals, the result follows. The sentence runs across its line breaks ("given / a season of ice, fissures growing") and moves as slowly as the process it describes. The imagery is geological and bodily at once. Rhizomes push their "fingers in past the knuckle," so plants become hands prying "dead stone open along its seam / of gleaming yellow." A seam suggests a vein of ore, so the yellow is both flower and treasure. The speaker's "own, too-corrosive minerals" are part of the story too, which suggests that whatever eats away at the self also cracks the stone open for growth. The stanza's punchline is plain: "a field spreads / wherever I used to feel hunger." Judging by the imagery, emptiness is not cured here. It is planted.
The final stanza adds humour and a little ache. The speaker stands "still as a tall stump / that doesn't belong," and that admission refuses a neat consolation. Yet the monarch butterflies, "beating, gliding, searching," three participles that mimic their flight, are looking for "a one-night hat stand." The phrase is domestic and comic, with a faint pun on "one-night stand," and it turns the stump into a place to land. Then comes the poem's boldest leap: "I could be the spot marked Mexico on a yellow map." The speaker, who once wanted, imagines being what others travel toward. The field becomes a map, and the person becomes a destination. The closing image, a shadow stretching "into the distant woods," makes sundown the end of the day that began before supper. The self reaches past the field's edge, long and thin, as the light goes.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and a relaxed, spoken rhythm. The ampersands and dashes give it the feel of a note jotted quickly, which keeps the metaphors from sounding grand. Yellow runs through it as a unifying colour: the field, the seam, the map. The sentences stretch and tighten as the poem's mood does.
What makes "The Yellow Field" memorable is its refusal to explain. It never says what the loss of appetite means. It gives a grandmother's cigarette, a crack in a stone, and a butterfly looking for somewhere to rest, and trusts us to feel how emptiness can turn out to be room. It is funny, a little lonely, and oddly generous, and it makes a lost appetite seem like the beginning of something.