Dave Bonta's "Love craft" is a sixteen-line fable about a man who makes a companion, lets her go, and then discovers he cannot stop wanting her. The speaker builds a "stick sweetheart," finds himself "unwilling to keep her," and sends her off to live with cranes. The poem moves from that dismissal through a stretch of consoling philosophy, then breaks it with a plain admission: "I want her still." The central idea is the tension between making something and letting it be free. The speaker wants to be generous, but his generosity keeps turning into control.
The title does a lot of work. Split into two words, "Love craft" makes love something built, like a carpentry project. The verbs in the first two stanzas follow this: "made," "make," "making." That repetition gives the speaker away. Even when he claims to release her, he says he "did make her think / of making herself happy." The phrase is clumsy on purpose. Her happiness is something he has installed, and the one reflexive moment in the poem, "herself," is still his doing. She never speaks, and every verb that touches her belongs to him: keep her, sent her, took her, hewed her.
The third stanza changes voice. "Ingenious treasurers / of time and folly / where one is free / there is great plenty" sounds like a proverb, a neat bit of wisdom the speaker uses to justify what he has done. The cranes are oddly rich. They live "in the dirt and the marl," yet they are "treasurers," and their wealth is time and the freedom to be foolish. The logic is appealing, but it comes too smoothly. Coming right after a stanza of awkward self-justification, it reads like a man talking himself into peace. The next line undoes him.
That line is the poem's hinge, and its plainness is the point. After the ornate maxims, "I want her still" is five short words with no decoration. The final sentence then runs on without a subject: "took her a glass of pure water / and hewed her / a thin ice bed." The missing "I" lets the want flow straight into action, as though the speaker has no time to deliberate. The gifts are tender, but they are also strange. Pure water is hospitable, yet she now lives among dirt and marl, so his gift comes from a cleaner, colder world than hers. "Hewed" belongs to axes and rough timber, so the craftsman is back at work, now carving a bed out of ice. Ice is thin, cold, and bound to melt. The poem leaves open whether this is courtship, apology, or something closer to a deathbed, and that ambiguity is where its unease comes from.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has four unrhymed quatrains, short lines of a few stresses, and no punctuation at all. Without commas or full stops, the lines slide into one another. "But unwilling to keep her / I sent her away" can be read in more than one way, and so can the proverb in stanza three. The poem avoids rhyme, but it leans on small echoes of sound. "Stick sweetheart" clicks and hisses, "ingenious treasurers" turns on its soft *s* and *r* sounds, and "folly" and "plenty" end on the same light vowel, a near-chime that gives the maxim some authority. The hard sounds of "dirt," "marl," and "hewed" bring in the physical world just as the speaker is trying to float above it.
The poem is worth reading because it says something uncomfortable in a very small space. It starts out as a fairy-tale gesture, and by the end it admits that the freedom it granted came with a string attached. The speaker's craft is real, but so is his reluctance to let go of what he has made. By stopping on the image of the ice bed, the poem avoids telling us whether she will come back. It leaves us with an offering that is beautiful, fragile, and a little self-serving, and we have to decide what to make of it.