Nineteen words, two couplets and not a single mark of punctuation: Dave Bonta's "Inscrutable" gives the reader almost nothing to hold, and that scarcity is the point. The scene is a late hour with a bottle or a book for company, but the poem is really about what happens to such company in the dark. Ordinary ways of getting through the night begin to feel like a presence, something bigger than a habit, and the speaker cannot say what it is or whether it exists.
The first couplet is a fragment with no main verb. "The bottle or a book / eating at the night" leaves its grammar hanging, and the hanging is productive. "Eating at" is close to the everyday idiom "what's eating at you?", so the phrase carries worry as well as consumption. The "at" also makes the eating slow and repeated, a nibbling rather than a swallowing, which suits the way an evening drains away in small bites. The line can be read two ways: the bottle or book is consuming the night, or the night is being worn down by whatever the speaker reaches for. Both are probably meant. The little word "or" matters too. It treats drink and reading as interchangeable, two answers to the same need. And "the bottle" is a definite, familiar object, while "a book" could be any book. Judging by this wording, the drinking is routine and the reading is more casual. Both are also old vessels of the sacred, since we speak of "spirits" and of "the Book", so the religious turn in the second couplet has been quietly prepared.
That turn comes with "like a god I neither can guess / nor believe in." The simile is slippery because the poem never says what is like a god. It could be the bottle, the book, the eating, or the night itself. The two verbs also do different jobs. To guess is to speculate about a god's nature, while to believe in is to accept that a god exists. The speaker fails at both, so the god is unknowable in character and doubtful in existence. Even so, the god has already done something, since it eats the night. The poem leaves us with a power whose effects are felt but whose identity is out of reach.
The form is as unsettled as the idea. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, though the first couplet has a faint rhythm, a quick "the BOTtle or a BOOK" followed by the falling "EATing at the NIGHT." The hard endings of "book" and "night" close each line like a door. The second couplet is longer and more hesitant. The "n" sounds of "neither," "nor" and "night" give the passage a low hum, and the hard g's of "god" and "guess" tie the divine to the act of guessing. Then the poem stops on "in," a preposition with nothing after it. Grammatically the sentence is unfinished, and the reader is left, like the speaker, with nothing to rest on.
The capitalisation is also telling. The only capital letter in the poem is the "I," which doesn't appear until the third line. The first couplet is impersonal, a still life of objects and darkness. The self enters only when the poem admits its ignorance, and it enters as a small, uncertain figure. The gap between the stanzas works like a held breath.
The title adds a final irony. "Inscrutable" never appears in the poem; the poem enacts the word instead. A book is the one object here meant to be read and examined, yet it sits beside the bottle in a blur and falls under the same unreadable authority. Part of the poem's significance is how much it does in so small a space. It manages to express a familiar modern position, a person who cannot believe and yet cannot shrug off the feeling that something vast is at work. It does this without argument or consolation, only an image and an honest admission, and it leaves us in the dark with the speaker.