Dave Bonta's "Memorial Service" begins with a complaint about elegy itself. "Can you believe / how many songs have been committed to stone / & none to the water that wears it down?" The poem is set at a funeral, but its real target is the habit of memorializing: we carve, fix and enshrine the dead, and in doing so lose the thing that made them alive. The central idea is that stone is how we remember and water is what a life actually is. The poem asks who will "bear witness to the current, the profligate flow," when every available form seems built to dam it.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no regular beat. Its lines break at the points of thought rather than at the end of a sentence, so it sounds like someone thinking aloud in a pew. The ampersands and the dashes after "surf–" and "remembering–" add to this, giving the speech a hurried, half-whispered quality. There are three stanzas, and the first two are joined mid-gesture: "I push them back" ends one, and "& blink" begins the next, so the break itself feels like a blink.
What holds the poem together is a pattern of opposites. On one side are stone, coffin, tomb, dust, levees and the page, all dry and fixed. On the other are surf, ocean, rain, mist, dripping, river, flood and current. Even small details join the pattern. The stranger at the podium has "hands [that] held their fire" and "teeth [that] trapped dust," which suggests a speaker who gives off no moisture, and perhaps no life. When the women stand to testify, the speaker hears "the first rumor of rain," and the poem begins to loosen. The word "precipitously" then arrives, a pun that carries rainfall inside an ordinary adverb. Even the six-pack in the second stanza belongs to this world of liquids, and the neighbor's praise that the dead woman was "full of spirit" quietly joins it.
The strangest move is the speaker's shifting identity. First "I was the dead girl who lay in the coffin / with her corona of hair cut short." A few lines later: "I was / the nice guy who never refused / to buy a six-pack for a teenage drunk." The phrase "recalling my role" is the key. One reading, which is an inference rather than anything the poem states, is that a funeral is a kind of theater in which everyone plays a part: the corpse, the generous friend, the mourner "alert / to the slow dripping of grief." The speaker slips between these parts, as if no single one could hold the person being mourned. This also supports the poem's argument. A life resists being fixed in one role, just as water resists being fixed in one shape.
The ending is where the poem's argument turns on itself. After the stanza about songs that "sag / on the page" and rivers that "lie down behind levees," the only voice left is the neighbor lady's: "She was always so full of spirit, says / the neighbor lady. It's hard / to believe." That last phrase echoes the opening question, "Can you believe," and the echo cuts two ways. It may be the speaker's dry comment on how a stock phrase flattens a vivid person. Or it may mean that the dead woman's spirit is hard to believe in now, because it has been channeled into a platitude. The poem does not decide, and the open ending is more honest than a neat consolation would be.
The poem matters because it is an elegy that distrusts elegies. It does not offer comfort. It questions the comforts a funeral supplies, such as monuments, fine words and respectful sentences. Its own images of rain, mist and a river are an attempt to do what it says other poems fail to do, which is to let the current run through the language rather than be walled in by it.