Six short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and not one word that names a feeling. Dave Bonta's "Grownups" reports a moment that will rearrange a life, a wife's suspicion that she is pregnant, and then simply declines to say how the speaker feels about it. What he does is told in a single gesture. The poem's central idea is that becoming a grownup is less a decision than something that arrives in a sentence, and that the mind answers it first in the body and the weather rather than in words.
The first couplet is the hardest to pin down, and the difficulty seems deliberate. "no other money no other time / to make use of all alone" can be read in two ways. It may be a complaint about scarcity: there is nothing else to spend and no other hour to spend it in. Or it may be a farewell to freedom: this money and this time are the last that the speaker can use "all alone." Without punctuation the phrases slide together. "All alone" is both an idiom and a pair of words that can be pulled apart, so the sense of "all" and the sense of "alone" blur. The repeated "no other" gives the lines a closing-door sound, and the stanza ends on "alone," the loneliest word in the poem, just before the poem turns to a second person.
That turn is plain to the point of flatness: "my wife tells me she thinks / she is with child." The register changes. The first stanza was abstract and a little riddling, and this one is conversational reported speech. The hedge "thinks" hangs at the end of its line, so the news arrives still unconfirmed, and the speaker seems to receive it in that uncertain state. "With child" is also an old-fashioned phrase, more formal and gentler than "pregnant," and it gives the moment a faint solemnity. It also introduces the word the poem uses to answer "alone."
That word is "with," and it returns in the last line: "I sit with the wind." The parallel is quietly striking. She is *with* child, and he is *with* the wind, so one person carries a new life and the other keeps company with something that cannot be held. The wind suggests change, unpredictability and the blowing-in of the unforeseen, though the poem never explains it. Before that, the speaker has been "flinging off my hat." A hat is a small badge of the respectable adult, and tearing it off is a boyish, impulsive act. It could be joy, panic, or the urge to be rid of anything that confines him. The title makes this ironic from either side. A man who flings his hat is hardly behaving like a "grownup," and yet the news is exactly what is turning him into one.
The poem's movement is its structure. The first stanza is solitary, the second brings in another person, and the third is action followed by stillness. "Flinging" is a burst of energy, and then "sit" brings everything to rest. The sound supports this. The long *i* of "time," "wife" and "child" belongs to the domestic, weighty vocabulary of the situation. In the last stanza it gives way to the clipped short *i* of "flinging," "sit," "with" and "wind," which has the quick, light feel of a release. There is no rhyme, and the poem needs none. The three couplets are balanced like a small ritual, with a state of mind, then a piece of news, then a reaction, and the missing punctuation lets the lines run as one unbroken breath.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves out. It has none of the announcements and none of the sentiment that usually surround talk of babies, and the speaker never says "I am happy" or "I am afraid." The reader has to supply that, and the reader's own answer becomes part of the poem. The compression is close to the haiku's habit of letting an image carry the emotion. Here the image is a man on a windy day with his hat off, sitting still. The poem suggests that the biggest changes of adult life may arrive quietly, and that the proper response is sometimes not a speech but a gesture, a silence and a bit of weather.