Few poems begin with an assignment as grisly as this one: sit with a corpse and see what it teaches. Dave Bonta's "Living On" opens with the command "Consider," then offers images that refuse to be comfortable. Flesh "can crawl." The bones of a beautiful face break "the crust of fantasy like little moons," and the eye sockets become "vacant snail-shells / still glistening with an off-white rheum." The comparison is both repulsive and strangely lovely, a skull rising like a moon yet slimy to the touch. That double vision sets the method for the whole poem. The second exercise, swallowing LSD and watching one's face in the mirror, ends with the same idea: the self is easily taken apart, "with what slight effort."
The poem's central question is how we should feel about being made of matter that does not care. The second stanza turns on a casually confessional phrase, "It's exhilarating, really," as if the speaker is admitting something slightly embarrassing. Matter is "blind" and "utterly insensitive to longing / or loneliness," yet it "somehow coheres." Even predators get their meals only "half-grudgingly," a wry detail, since the poem gives indifferent matter a sulky temperament while insisting it has none.
Then comes the real shock: "True horror comes disguised / as cold necessity." The horror is not the corpse but the fourth-grade science lesson. Cells turn the body into "prisons" and "office towers populated by soft- / walled cubicles," images of confinement and paperwork. Atoms become "solar systems with pin-prick suns," "barely enclosed eternities / of inner space." The stanza ends on the "schoolroom clock," which "made a mockery of turning." One plausible reading is that the clock's hands go round in the same tidy way the atom model's electrons do, and both are reminders that time is running out. Notice, too, how the line break splits "soft- / walled" and leaves "chance" dangling before "mouths." The verse itself seems to fall apart, as the poem's bodies do.
The last stanza shifts into the conditional: "They could have said," "They could have told us." The speaker imagines a different lesson, in which matter is "incredibly rare, / a temporary resting state for energy." The word "fictons" is unusual. Judging by the context, it may be a coinage that blends "fiction" with the names of subatomic particles, which would suit the idea that a lover's caress is held up by something not quite solid. The caress avoids "a null set," a mathematical term for emptiness, and bodies collapse only into "a shrug / of cold fusion," an almost jokey phrase for an enormous event. Even the promised comfort is hedged: "What a comfort / it would've been, maybe." That "maybe" stops the poem from becoming a sermon.
The ending returns to the title. "Living on" here is not a soul drifting upward but a corpse "rippling outward for millions of years," left in "bone shards" or "a line / of footprints in some fossilized beach / that come to a sudden end." The final phrase, "indelible / record of buoyancy, & the killer wave," holds life and death in one image. "Buoyancy" is the lightest word in the poem, and it lands right beside the wave that ends it.
Formally, the poem is free verse. It has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its three stanzas vary in length. Its energy comes from long, winding sentences, from enjambment, and from sound: the soft "s" and "l" of "vacant snail-shells / still glistening" make decay almost tender. The ampersands give it the feel of a notebook entry rather than a polished lecture.
The poem matters because it takes a scientific view of the world and asks what it feels like, rather than just what it means. It suggests that the facts of matter are not the problem. The problem is the tone in which we learn them, flat and "cold," when the same facts could be told as wonder. The poem leaves open whether that retelling would truly console, but it makes a persuasive case that the telling matters.