Few phrases are as tired as "old hat," which we use for anything stale, predictable, or seen too many times. Dave Bonta's five-line poem gives that phrase a voice and lets it answer back. The speaker is the cliché itself, and instead of apologizing for being worn out, it announces its own cleverness. By the end it has taken its idiom literally and found a new use for it.
The opening line, "I am old hat," is a plain statement, almost a shrug. Then the poem turns the idiom into an object. A hat has seams, bands and a brim, and "the lines meet" can describe the places where the fabric joins. But "lines" also means lines of verse, and so the poem quietly starts talking about itself. It is a small structure whose lines meet, and it admits it is a familiar, even outdated, one. The word "quaint" confirms the self-mockery. Nobody calls their own work quaint unless they are pre-empting the critic. Calling the hat a "nest" completes the shift. A nest is a shelter made from scraps, and the image turns the shabby thing into a snug, handmade home. It also hints at a hat sitting round and warm on a head, the way a bird sits on eggs.
The fourth line is the longest, at seven syllables where the others have three or four, and it is where the poem lets itself show off. "Look at me go" is the voice of a child on a bicycle, or a performer about to try a trick. The trick is the verb "to sandwich," which turns a lunch noun into an action word. A hat does sit between a person's ears, so the literal picture is comic and exact: the hat as the bread, the head as the filling. Without the "-s" of a plural or any article, "sandwich" lands with a slightly absurd thump, and the poem seems pleased with itself for it.
The last line, "this ear with that," widens the meaning again. Because the poem is built on lines meeting, its ear may be the listener's, and the poem may be a small device for joining one ear to another. A poem is heard as well as read, and its sounds travel from one person's ear to someone else's. Read this way, the "old hat" is the whole tradition of verse passed around, familiar but still useful. The poem never says so, which is part of the pleasure. The two readings, hat and poem, sit side by side without either cancelling the other.
The poem's form supports this. There is no punctuation at all, and after the first word, "I," every line begins in lowercase, so the thought slides from one line to the next like a single sentence. There is no formal rhyme scheme, but the first line ends on "hat" and the last on "that," a near-echo that closes a loop. In a poem about lines meeting, the ending literally meets the beginning. The sound patterns elsewhere are gentle. The long "i" of "I," "lines" and "my" runs through the first three lines, and the clipped consonants of "meet," "nest" and "hat" give it a tight, tucked-in feel. The short lines suggest something small and portable, as a hat should be.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a dead idiom, shows what was physically buried in it, and in doing so makes a modest argument about poetry. Familiar things, whether phrases or forms, are not necessarily used up. The poem is an old hat that has been turned over and found to have room inside. It also does this without solemnity, since a speaker who says "look at me go" is clearly enjoying the game. The humor is what keeps the idea from feeling like a lecture. After a few readings, "old hat" stops sounding like an insult and starts to sound like a place to sit.