Eight short lines, no full stops, no question marks, and yet the poem is made almost entirely of questions and half-answers. Dave Bonta's "Incipient" circles a problem that sounds simple: how does anything begin? The title already sets the tone. "Incipient" describes something only just starting, not yet formed. The poem behaves accordingly. It never settles into a finished statement, and it stays at the threshold, as if it, too, doesn't know how to start.
The construction is neat. A single line opens the poem ("who knows how to begin"), a couplet follows, another single line comes next ("New Year's is of use to whom"), and a second couplet closes. The poem alternates between a thought and an image, between asking and showing. Nothing is punctuated, and everything is lowercase except the "New Year's" of the third stanza. So the first line can be read as a real question, a shrug, or a confession. Because the poem withholds the question mark, the doubt is never resolved into a tidy form. There is no regular meter and no end rhyme. Lines run from four syllables to seven, and the short, uneven breaths make the poem feel like thinking out loud.
The first image, "through the garden / ringing and pretty," is deliberately incomplete. Nothing is named as doing the ringing. It could be bells, birdsong, or frost-hard air, and the missing subject lets the sound simply travel. Judging by the imagery, the setting is a garden at the turn of the year, a place that is both a scene of nature and a cultivated, human-made space. The adjectives are a revealing pair. "Ringing" belongs to hearing and carries the sense of a celebration or alarm. "Pretty" is a small, almost dismissive word, the kind you'd use for a card or a decoration. Placing it next to "ringing" lets the scene shimmer while quietly undercutting any grand claims about fresh starts. The echo of the short *i* in "ringing," "pretty" and, earlier, "begin" ties the image back to the opening question.
Then comes the poem's sharpest line: "New Year's is of use to whom." The word order is stiff and slightly formal, like a question from a committee meeting, and that stiffness is the joke. It asks of the most sentimental of holidays what it is *for*. The missing noun after "New Year's" (Day? Eve?) also makes the phrase feel clipped, as though the holiday has been reduced to a bare label. The speaker is not exactly cynical. The question is open and genuinely curious, as though looking for who benefits from drawing a line through time.
The final couplet offers what reads like an answer: "a new invention / a noon at night." The calendar year is a human invention, not something the garden knows about. The repeated "new" (from "New Year's" into "a new invention") makes the poem seem unable to escape its own subject, while "noon" echoes it in sound. The last line is a paradox, and it works on more than one level. Fireworks and lit windows could make midnight feel like daylight. On the clock face, too, noon and midnight are the same position, twelve, so the moment the old year turns into the new is literally a noon placed in the dark. The year's beginning is a trick of the clock, and it is also a small marvel. "Invention" even suggests a kind of making, and the poem never says whether that is a flaw or a gift.
What makes "Incipient" worth reading is how fully its form matches its meaning. A poem about beginnings that opens with doubt, avoids closing punctuation and ends on an image rather than a conclusion is itself still in the act of starting. In under thirty words it manages to be skeptical and delighted at once. It asks what the New Year is good for and then, almost against its own doubt, hands us a startling picture of light in the dark. For a reader, the lesson is that a beginning may be partly something we invent, and that it can still be strange and beautiful.