Most practice points at something ahead: scales for the concert, laps for the race. Dave Bonta's "Contemplation" turns that logic over in its first sentence. The speaker practises "seeing without breaking," and the reward is "nothing more / than the present." A few lines later a sea goes quiet and the poem stops. It is tiny, but it holds a surprisingly complete idea about what attention is for: not for getting anywhere, only for being fully where you already are.
The first line carries most of the weight, and it is deliberately unfinished. Breaking what? The poem never says. It could mean seeing without disturbing what is seen, the way a hand ruins the surface of still water. It could mean looking without breaking the silence, or without the gaze itself cracking under what it takes in. Because the object is missing, all of these readings stay open. The word "breaking" also has a second life once we reach the sea, since waves break. A sea that has "fallen quiet" is one that has stopped breaking, so the opening phrase and the closing image answer each other across the gap between the stanzas.
The idea of practising "for nothing more / than the present" is a gentle paradox. "Nothing more" sounds modest, almost apologetic, yet the present is everything we ever actually have. The line break helps. "For nothing more" ends on the word "more," which hangs for a moment as if the speaker might ask for something grander, and then "than the present" arrives short and plain. The word "present" can also mean a gift, and that echo is hard to ignore, though the poem never presses it.
The second stanza turns from statement to image, and the image is a simile with no main verb of its own: "like a sea fallen quiet / with the settling of other lives." The sea has "fallen" quiet, the way a wind falls, so the calm seems to arrive from outside rather than be forced. Then comes "settling," which suggests silt sinking in water, birds folding their wings, or a house going still at night. Settled water is clear, so there is a quiet logic here: when things stop churning, you can see. The phrase "other lives" is left unspecified, and that openness is part of its power. Judging by the wording, the poem suggests that this kind of contemplation is not a retreat from the world. The calm depends on other beings coming to rest around the watcher.
Notice, too, what happens to the speaker. "I" appears only in the first stanza. In the second, the self has dissolved into the scene, and the sea is the only subject left. The poem enacts what it describes: the one who practises disappears into the thing practised.
The form supports this. The poem is a tercet followed by a couplet, with short lines of roughly four to eight syllables. It has no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, and the compression is reminiscent of haiku, though it does not follow a strict syllable count. Without full stops, nothing is sealed off, and the poem ends on "lives" as if the sentence were still continuing quietly beyond the page. The sound is soft in the same way. The s-sounds of "seeing," "practice," "present," "sea" and "settling" make a faint hush, like water drawing back over sand. Three of the key words, "seeing," "breaking" and "settling," are -ing forms, the grammar of actions still in progress. The only completed action is "fallen," which names the result, the quiet that remains.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it does not lecture. It could have announced that we should live in the moment, a phrase so worn that it slides past us. Instead it gives one small ethic, to look without damaging, and one image of what success feels like, a sea with the wind gone out of it. Read slowly and aloud, it asks very little of its reader except the thing it describes, which is to stop, look and leave the surface unbroken.