The title promises a paradox, and the poem takes a few lines to show who the "enemies" might be. "Best of enemies" suggests rivals who know each other too well to be strangers. Dave Bonta never names them, but the three short stanzas hint at a quarrel inside one person: the self that wants company and the self that wants to slip out into the dark.
The first stanza makes a strange request. The speaker would "borrow a lost god / to hinder me with a hard / and slippery light." Most people ask a god for help or freedom, but here the speaker wants to be held back. The god is "lost" and has to be "borrowed," so it is something no longer owned, perhaps an old belief taken down from a shelf for a particular job. The light is just as odd. "Hard" and "slippery" belong to ice or polished stone, not to light, so the phrase gives illumination a surface that resists the hand. Judging by the imagery, this light is something you can't quite grip, yet it still gets in your way. The line break after "a hard" makes the reader pause on that word before "and slippery light" softens it.
The second stanza turns from the divine to the ordinary: "I invite guests / meaning to be merry for / I could not be alone." Everything hinges on "for." Read quickly, "meaning to be merry" sounds festive. The "for" at the line's end then turns the cheer into a reason, and the reason is a confession. The guests are there because the speaker "could not be alone," not because the speaker is sociable. The alliteration of "meaning" and "merry" has a slightly forced jollity, like a toast made through nerves. The missing punctuation adds to this, because the stanza never stops to let the admission settle.
The last stanza explains the first two, and it is the most striking: "whatever I am is naked / and would have stayed out / all night." The phrase "whatever I am" admits the speaker doesn't know what the core self is, only that it is bare, without clothes or social manners. Then the grammar shifts. "Would have stayed out" is a conditional about the past, which implies it didn't stay out. The guests worked, or the borrowed god did, and the naked thing was kept in. The word "night" echoes the n of "naked," linking the exposed self to the darkness it wanted. The picture has a faintly animal, even childlike quality, like something that would happily wander under the stars if no one stopped it.
Reading the poem this way, the "enemies" are the part of us that builds company, rules and lights, and the part that wants nothing between itself and the night. Calling them the "best" of enemies suggests they need each other. The sociable self needs the wild one to have something to guard against, and the wild one needs the sociable one for a roof and a warm room. Whether the speaker is grateful for being hindered or resentful is left open, which is part of the poem's honesty.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has three tercets of free verse, no rhyme and no end punctuation. The short lines, around four to six syllables, break at awkward places ("a hard," "merry for," "stayed out"), so the sense keeps tipping over into the next line. That suits a speaker who cannot settle. The sound is quiet too. "Hinder" and "hard" share an opening breath, and the soft consonants of "slippery light" and "all night" give the poem its closing hush. The pronoun "I" appears in the first two stanzas, then dissolves into "whatever I am," as if the speaker has stopped being a person and become a condition.
The poem matters because it is brief and unflattering about loneliness. It doesn't dress the need for company as generosity. It admits that parties, and perhaps even gods, can be tools for keeping ourselves from something we half want. A reader may finish it unsure whether the naked self should have been let out, and the poem is happy to leave that question there.