We say two people have "chemistry" without picturing a laboratory. Dave Bonta's poem takes that worn-out metaphor literally and sends love into the lab. Love is the scientist, a woman's body is the apparatus, and the experiments are things bodies really do: feeding, tasting, kissing. By the last lines, though, the white coat has slipped, and the figure we're left with is not a scientist at all but a poet.
The grammar carries much of the idea. The poem is one sentence, and its verbs all depend on "could": love "could experiment," "could discover," "could invent," or "find a way." This is the language of hypothesis, not report. Nothing is said to happen; things are only permitted to. The verbs also climb a small ladder of ambition. To experiment is to begin, to discover is to find what was already there, to invent is to make something new, and to ferment is to set a process going and let it work by itself. It matters that the milk is *discovered*, not invented. "The way of milk / coming into the breasts" belongs to the body's own old knowledge, and love merely stumbles on it. Tastes can be invented, and a kiss can be left to change, as grapes become wine. "Ferment" is a double-edged word, since it suggests intoxication and sweetness but also slow transformation, even souring.
Then there is the odd phrase "her two bodies." The poem doesn't explain it, and the milk suggests one reading: the body that is a lover's and the body that is a mother's, treated as one continuous site of experiment. Another reader might hear the woman and the child she feeds. Either way, the erotic and the nurturing sit side by side without comment. The pronoun also gives a faint chill. "Her" is the place where things happen, while love is the one who acts, and a careful reader may wonder what it means to be someone's laboratory.
Structurally the poem is plain. It has four couplets and no regular meter, and its vocabulary is mostly short, ordinary words. Rhyme is absent, but sound still ties things together. "Experiment" in the first line is echoed by "ferment" in the sixth, as if the poem's opening idea were itself being left to work. The enjambment helps too. At the end of "the way of milk," the line breaks, and the milk arrives on the next line, "coming into the breasts," the way the phrase describes. The one true rhyme comes late and quietly: "breasts" and the final word, "rest." That joins the body to the heart, and it is a sly effect, because the poem's subject is restlessness and its last word is the stillness it denies.
That last couplet is where the poem turns: "like a poet who never saw / a heart at rest." The simile can be read two ways. A poet who has only ever seen hearts racing, aching or breaking might be unable to leave one alone, and love, like that poet, keeps tinkering because it knows nothing calmer. Or a heart at rest might be a stopped heart, the kind an anatomist sees, so that the poet has only ever known "heart" as a figure of speech, never as an organ. The poem doesn't choose, and the ambiguity is the point. Either way, the comparison turns the lens on writing itself. Judging by the title, the "Romantic" in "Romantic chemistry" may nod at the literary sense of the word as well as the amorous one. The glib science of love turns out to be the poet's habit, and the poem seems to know it.
What makes such a short poem worth studying is how much it holds together without settling. In eight lines it joins science, desire, motherhood and metaphor, and it admits that the language we use for love is itself an experiment, careless and inventive, with no interest in letting the heart be still.