Two stones are enough to hold a whole life in "Talismanic," and Dave Bonta needs only four short lines to show how. The poem sets a pair of small objects side by side and finds in them a split inside the speaker: one stone pulls toward work and the unmade future, the other rests as something already arrived at. Its central idea is that a talisman works less like a magic charm than like a mirror. We hold it so that we can hear what we already half know about ourselves.
The title does quiet work. A talisman is an object believed to carry power or protection, and the poem never says where the stones are or how the speaker came by them. All we get is the word "sitting," which suggests stillness, perhaps in a palm or on a shelf, though that setting is our guess. Leaving the scene blank keeps attention on the stones themselves.
The opening line, "stone and stone," has no verb and no adjective. It is two identical nouns joined by "and," as if the speaker were laying them down one after the other. At first glance they are interchangeable. The poem then repeats the doubling with "one... one," and the repetition sets up a difference the reader cannot immediately see. Nothing says which stone is which. That is where the simile "secret as cards" earns its place. Cards in a hand are face-down, their value hidden, and the word carries a faint air of chance and fortune. The stones are the same kind of closed object: their meaning is private until the speaker turns them over. The sound supports this. "Sitting secret" hushes into sibilance, and that soft *s* carries on through "settled," so the poem seems to lower its voice as it talks about secrets.
The second couplet is where the stones separate. "One calling me to ore" uses an active, ongoing participle, and ore is stone in its raw state, rock that still contains something that might be dug out, heated and made into a thing. The first stone stands for vocation, labour, and the pull of unfinished possibility. Spoken aloud, "ore" sounds like "or," and the line may quietly murmur a choice. That is an inference from the sound, not something the poem insists on. The second stone gets different grammar altogether: "one the settled music of my life." The verb has dropped out. Where the first stone calls, the second simply *is*, and the sentence stands still to match.
"Settled" is well chosen. It means calm and resolved, but it is also what sediment does and what stones do when they come to rest. "Music" is the surprise. Stone is silent, so the metaphor turns something mute into harmony, the sense that a life has found its key. Music also exists only in time, so even the restful stone is not quite dead weight. Set against each other, the two images give us raw material on one side and something already made on the other.
The form is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation, in lowercase, like a note jotted down rather than a performance. The lines grow as they go. Counting syllables, they run three, six, six, and nine, so the poem widens from the bare pair of stones to the full sweep of a life, and the longest line comes last, slow enough for "settled" to land. The first-person words, "me" and "my," do not appear until the second half. The poem starts with objects and arrives at a self.
What makes it worth reading is its refusal to choose. The speaker does not pick restlessness over contentment or the reverse. Both stones keep sitting there. A single life, the poem suggests, can contain a pull toward the raw and a peace already won, and a small, ordinary object can be the thing that lets us say so.