Dave Bonta's poem begins with a mushroom and ends with the night sky. Between them it asks a question that is easy to miss: what happens to something when you copy it, and what is left that can't be copied at all?
The opening is all foraging. A giant puffball "bulges among / the dried stalks of goldenrod / like a misplaced hope", a strange and exact simile. Hope is out of place in a dead field, and it doesn't multiply. The speaker looks for others "without success." Then the poem turns domestic, with the puffball's "spongy cloud-flesh" chopped into a clam sauce. That phrase plants a word the poem will keep returning to. Clouds drift back as "mist" and again at the very end.
The second stanza zooms out and in at once. A porcupine-girdled spruce stands at the center of "a galaxy / of needles," so a patch of forest floor becomes a star system. The speaker calls the scatter of light and dark needles "a pleasing blend," a deliberately mild phrase for someone absorbed in looking. Then he crouches by the hickory shells and traces words in the dirt "over & over," as if writing into "the uncomprehending palm / of a young Helen Keller." The comparison is bold. The audience here is the whole natural world, which receives the words by touch and can't read them. The repetition also anticipates the Xerox machine, since writing something again and again is a kind of copying too.
The photocopier takes over the middle of the poem. The father makes "a copy / of a copy / of a copy," and the lines on the page repeat just as the copies do, each one a little fainter, until the poem "rose from the page like mist." The loss is treated as beautiful, which is typical of the poem's gentleness. The speaker admits he has forgotten the point of the exercise, offering two guesses: "the need to keep / the originals" or the need "to write / as firmly as we could." These are the poem's two poles. One is preserving the real thing, the other is pressing hard enough that something survives.
The central memory is the five-year-old in the after-hours library, among "wordless books," asking, "Will it make a copy of me?" The father's reply, "Sure. Close your eyes," is playful, maybe a small fib. The child feels the beam "rake" his face, then the "letdown" of a sheet of paper "heavy / with drying ink." What he wanted was an "identical twin," and the adult speaker adds a startling thought: "Imagine someone with whom / deceit is impossible." Judging by that line, the fantasy of a copy is also a fantasy of being completely known, with no gap between the self and its double. The machine can't offer that.
What it offers instead comes when they step outside. The sky is full of "fast-moving clouds / back-lit by an almost-full moon," and the boy whispers, "Clouds at night!" The poem's logic closes here. The cloud-flesh puffball, the mist of the faded poem and the real clouds all belong to one thread, and the real clouds are the only ones that can't be photocopied. The child's last glance "behind me / into the shadows" may be a look back at the machine or the building. It might also be a check for the twin who never appeared. The poem leaves that open.
Formally, the poem is relaxed free verse with no rhyme. Its rhythm is that of talk, helped by ampersands, dashes and sentences that spill over line breaks. The four- or five-sentence scenes feel like memories surfacing in whatever order they like. The dialogue is spare, and the revelation at the end is a whisper rather than a flourish.
The poem matters because it takes a childhood anecdote about a machine and turns it into a reflection on originality and attention. Copies fade, the twin never arrives, and even the speaker's own poem is a copy of memory. Yet the final image feels fresh and singular, as if the point of making a copy were to send you back out under the real sky.