Almost nothing in "Widower's song" is stated outright, and that is where its power comes from. Dave Bonta never uses the word "death" or "grief". The title tells us the speaker is a man whose wife has died, and the rest of the poem is a list of what she left. The grief shows in how the list is put together.
The opening stanza sets the method: "she left behind / her road and her doors / her never sit down / her nothing her no / body." The word "her" arrives again and again, like someone touching each object in a room to check it is still there. The things listed are strange ones. A road and doors suggest movement and thresholds, a person always arriving or leaving. "Her never sit down" is stranger still, because it takes a whole habit, a woman who could not be still, and squeezes it into a single noun phrase, as if the speaker had said it to himself so often that it hardened into a name. Then comes the stanza's quiet shock. The line "her nothing her no" breaks, and the last line is just "body." The word "nobody" is cut in two, so that "no" hangs at the end of one line and "body" stands alone below it. Either she is a nobody now, or there is no body, only objects and habits. The line break makes both readings possible, and the second is especially painful, since a poem about someone's absence ends the stanza on the word for what is missing.
The second stanza turns to belief: "the discipline / of her religion / sober and drunk." The phrase "sober and drunk" is wonderfully ambiguous. It could mean she kept her faith in every state, or that the speaker watched it in both of his. The poem does not say. The flat, almost casual phrase also sounds like a man admitting something about himself while pretending to describe her.
The third stanza contains the poem's only simile, and it is a sharp one: "her living hand / melancholy as a careless gun." The adjective "living" is surprising in an elegy, and it may be the hand as he remembers it, still alive in his mind. A gun can't be melancholy, and a melancholy gun that is also careless suggests sadness that could go off at any moment and hurt someone by accident. Judging by the imagery, her sorrow was not gentle, and neither is his memory of it. Then, with no linking word, two more things are set side by side: "her fear her truth." The lack of punctuation lets them sit as equals. Her fear and her truth may be the same thing.
The shortest stanza ends the poem: "her contract with me / to make whole." The word "contract" is cold and legal, yet it points to the marriage bond and to a promise on both sides. The final phrase has no object and no clear subject. Did she agree to make him whole, or the two of them, or the world? It also quietly echoes the "hole" of the loss, though that sound-play is the reader's inference, not something the poem insists on. The poem stops mid-thought, with the contract unfulfilled or its terms unknowable.
Formally, the poem refuses the comfort its title promises. A "song" suggests melody, but there is no rhyme, no regular meter and no punctuation. The lines are short and halting, and nearly everything is a fragment. The only finite verb in the whole poem is "left," so the sentence that begins the poem never really recovers. The stanzas shrink from five lines to three, three and two, as though the speaker's breath were running out.
What makes the poem significant is how little it asks us to take on trust. It doesn't tell us the dead woman was good or beloved, only that she was particular: restless, devout, frightened, dangerous in her sadness. Mourning here is an act of accurate remembering, and the poem's last word leaves the widower holding an agreement that can no longer be carried out.