Politeness is usually something the living perform, and Dave Bonta's "Polished" opens by naming who does it best: the dead. A body in a grave, we are told, is "without / any breach of civility." It never interrupts, spills or says the wrong thing. It is the perfect guest. The joke is deadpan, and its darkness takes a moment to land. The only way to be flawlessly well-mannered is to be incapable of behaving at all. Good manners start to look like a rehearsal for death, all stillness and silence and holding everything in.
The first couplet hides a small pun in its line break. "A body in a grave is without" can be read, for the length of a breath, as "is outside," the old sense of the word. Only the next line turns it into "lacking." So the body is at once shut out of civility and free of its failures. "Breach" does double duty too. It means a lapse in etiquette, but it also suggests a gap in a wall or a broken surface, and the grave is exactly the thing that keeps the body unbroken. Meanwhile "civility" is the longest, stiffest word in the poem, and its unstressed tail ("-ility") drifts off like a polite murmur.
Then comes "though," the poem's only turn. It concedes a flaw in the perfect behaviour: "its mouth / is all drawn in." The phrase can describe prim, pursed lips, the face of someone disapproving at a dinner party. It can also describe the shrinking and tightening of a dead face. Prissiness and decay are the same gesture here. The lines themselves are drawn in, too. After the seven-syllable lines of the opening, "though its mouth" and "is all drawn in" shrink to three and four syllables, so the shape on the page matches the mouth.
The last couplet turns the poem. "Like what teemed / at so late a supper" is a simile that never quite settles. The poem doesn't say what teemed, but the verb suggests a crowd, something swarming and small. Judging by the setting, I read it as the creatures that feed on a buried body, though the poem lets us supply that ourselves. Recalling Hamlet's joke about worms at a very different sort of dinner is natural. The grammar also keeps the comparison loose: the mouth may be drawn in like those feeders, gathered close around food, or the whole scene may simply be the table where they crowd. Either way, "late" is the key. It means the hour, but it also means "the late," as in the deceased. The supper is late because the guest is. And once the swarm arrives, the polite diner has quietly become the meal.
That reversal explains the title. "Polished" is the veneer of good manners, the shine on a well-behaved surface. It also suggests bone worn smooth, and "polished off," what one does to a plate of food. Coming before the poem, it sounds like a compliment. Coming after, it sounds like a verdict.
The form supports this restraint. There are three couplets, no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. The whole poem is a single sentence, spoken in an even, unflustered voice, as if it, too, were too well-bred to raise its tone. The sound work is quiet: the long *e* of "breach" and "teemed" links the first and last couplets, and the soft *s* and *p* of "so late a supper" let the poem end on a murmur rather than a thud. The final line is also the longest of the second half. After all that drawing in, it opens out again, like a table being laid.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in about twenty words. It refuses both sentimentality and shock. There is no weeping over the grave and no horror-film imagery, only a dry observation that puts politeness and appetite side by side. The reader is left to notice that the gap between them is smaller than it looks, and that the neat surface of civility has always had a hungry, crowded table behind it.