Late is the poem's first word of substance, and it works twice: it is late in the evening, and it is late in a life. Dave Bonta's "Axe" watches someone, addressed only as "you," slip out of the world through the loss of reading. The poem never says who this person is, but the tenderness of the address and the speaker's exhaustion suggest someone close, perhaps a parent or an old companion. It ends with the speaker holding an unexpected tool. The poem is about the death of a loved one, and about how little a survivor can do except turn grief into something useful, or at least something sharp.
The opening stanza is built on images of slowing and preserving. Lamplight "gelled around you / like pine sap thickening into amber," and amber is sap that has stopped moving and been kept. The person is being fossilised while still alive. The detail that hurts most is that they are "losing words / in the exact reverse order of how you learned them decades before." The line itself runs long and unwinds slowly, as if unspooling in the same backward direction. Then the book becomes "as blankly comforting as a glass of milk." Milk takes the reader back to infancy, and "blankly comforting" holds two feelings at once: the peace of not needing to understand, and the sadness of an emptied mind. Nothing here is melodramatic, which makes it more affecting.
In the second stanza Death arrives as a character, and he is oddly charmed instead of fearsome. He has come "not for the reasons usually alleged," meaning no villainy and no violence. He is "enchanted by your bones, / which were light as piccolos." The comparison turns the skeleton into an instrument, tiny, high and delicate, and it prepares the musical joke that arrives at the end. The skull's smile shows through the skin "like a subliminal advertisement for eternal spring." That is a startling and darkly funny line. Death advertises, a little too slickly, and the promise is hidden below the level of notice. The comic tone never cancels the sadness, though, and the stanza ends with two short, flat sentences: "The clock stopped in mid-tick. / Your eyes took on a faraway look." After so many elaborate similes, the plain statements feel like a door closing.
The final stanza shifts to the speaker, and the voice becomes frank and tired. "Was I supposed to run after you? I was tired." The question admits the guilt that often follows a death, the sense that there was something one should have done, and it answers itself with a shrug. Then comes the pun that gives the poem its title. "My trademark guitar had long since gone electric – / an axe, as they say." In slang, an axe is a guitar, and the speaker's own music has hardened and amplified. The phrase "as they say" gives it a casual, deflating tone. That casualness is soon undercut by a literal axe, "the kind with back-to-back blades: / one for the kindling, one for the icy air." The reader has to decide what the blades mean. Kindling suggests warmth, fire and making something from what is left. Swinging at "icy air" suggests striking at an absence, which is both futile and defiant. A double-bladed axe cuts in two directions, much as grief does.
The poem uses no rhyme and no steady metre. It is free verse in three stanzas of six, seven and four lines. The shrinking shape suits its subject, since the last stanza is the shortest and leaves the most unsaid. The ampersand in "& your skull's smile" gives the page a casual, handwritten look. Sound still matters: the soft, sticky words of the first stanza ("gelled," "thickening," "amber") give way to the lighter sounds of "piccolos" and "subliminal," and then to the hard consonants of "axe," "blades" and "kindling."
What makes the poem memorable is how it mixes registers. Elegy, comedy, advertising slang and rock-and-roll jargon all sit side by side without spoiling one another. It suggests that grief rarely arrives in one pure tone. Sometimes it comes as a glass of milk, a joke about an advertisement, or a pun, and the tool the speaker ends up with is part instrument and part blade.