Dave Bonta's "Triptych in Noir" never says that anyone is sad, and it never says what crime put a man in jail. It gives us a woman awake at night, three images, and a room slowly turning into a cell. The central idea is that waiting for someone who is shut away can shut you in as well. By the end, the woman is not just thinking about prison; she is lying inside its pattern.
The title sets up the whole design. A triptych is a picture in three panels, and the poem has three stanzas of five, four and six lines. Noir suggests black-and-white film, shadows, insomnia and trouble. The first panel gets there through the verb "loses color." In the mirror, her "jailed lover's image" fades, and two similes explain how. It is like "tea poured again & again / from the same leaves," each pouring weaker than the last. It is also like cigarette smoke "mixing with the air," which thins until it can't be told from the room. Both images are about memory wearing out through repetition and drift. The more she goes over his image, the less of him is left. The ampersand is a small touch, but it makes the repetition look quick and a little worn.
The middle panel is the strangest, and the poem seems to know it. "beneath the mirror's mercury lies / the captain lost at sea." The line break lets "lies" mean both "rests" and "deceives," which suits a mirror, a surface that only seems to show the truth. Mercury is also what silvers old mirrors, so the glass becomes a sea with a drowned man under it. The poem never says who the captain is. Judging by the placement, he may be the lover seen through some other story, but the text doesn't confirm it. What it does tell us is that he is lost inside "some / interminable corrido," a word that names a narrative ballad tradition. "Interminable" is the longest, slowest word in the poem, and it stretches the line the way a song that won't end stretches an evening. Then comes the sharpest detail: "his waterproof watch still ticks inside his slicker." The sounds of "ticks" and "slicker" click against each other like the watch. The watch is built to survive the water, and it does, but that survival helps no one. Time keeps going while the man is gone, which is exactly her situation.
In the last panel the poem comes back to the room. "it's past 3:00" is plain, the hour of sleeplessness, and the streetlight "outshines the moon," so a manufactured glow beats the natural one. Slatted blinds cut that light into "two sets of stripes that cross at / an oblique angle on the walls & the bed." Stripes crossing at an angle look like bars, and they fall across the bed where she lies. The colon after "moon" works like a drumroll before the reveal. The line break after "cross at" also makes the sentence tilt, as if it were itself at an oblique angle. Her lover is in jail, but the light has put her behind bars too.
Sound and rhythm back this up. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are uneven, and the poem has no full stops at all. The sentences just run on and stop, which suits a night with no clear edges. The lowercase, unpunctuated flow makes the poem feel like a thought that can't be shut off.
The ending is the cleverest part. The poem began with color draining out of an image. It finishes in a room of light and dark stripes, with her "staring into the one dark corner." That corner is the only place the bars of light don't reach. It could be a refuge, or it could be a blank, the mirror's fading image with nothing left in it. The poem doesn't decide, and I think that is the point. She is looking at the one patch where nothing is happening.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it uses to do this. It has no names, no backstory and no stated feelings. Instead it builds a mood from a mirror, a watch and a window, and it lets a film genre's look stand in for her emotional state. A reader finishes it with the same unease she must feel, and that is more convincing than being told she is lonely.