Six short lines, three couplets, no punctuation and almost no capital letters: Dave Bonta's "Composer" looks so slight on the page that it is easy to miss how much it holds. It works like a small creed. The speaker says what he is made of, what he lives for, and what he thinks the world is.
The opening line, "water goes to water again," sounds like a law of nature, and it recalls the old funeral formula "dust to dust." The word "again" matters because it makes the movement a cycle, something that has happened before and will happen once more. Then comes the pivot: "and I to song." The verb is gone, so the speaker borrows "goes" from the line above and the grammar fuses him with the water. Just as water returns to water, he returns to song, as if music were his natural element. The "I" is also the only capital letter in the poem, a single upright figure among lowercase lines, and it is surrounded and absorbed at once.
The second couplet turns from nature to a vow. "To live for music is enough" is the poem's one flat declaration, and its word "enough" is modest, almost shrugging. It sits next to "the ear in ecstasy," which is anything but modest. "Ecstasy" comes from a Greek word meaning to stand outside oneself, and that fits the opening, where the self dissolves into song. Notice too that only the ear is named. The speaker becomes one listening organ, so that ecstasy is attention rather than noise or excitement. The poem is calm even as it describes rapture.
The last couplet widens the view: "and all the imaginable world / made of alterations." The word "imaginable" is a careful choice. The world he means is the one that can be imagined, and that is what a composer works with. "Alterations" can be read musically, since variation, modulation and development are how a piece of music moves. But it also describes water, which never keeps one shape. This is the poem's central idea. Water, music and the world are all made of change, so giving yourself to music is not an escape from reality but a way of joining its deepest habit. The title supports this reading. A composer is literally someone who puts things together, and here he does it by altering what already flows.
The poem's craft is quiet but deliberate. There is no rhyme, yet the sound circles back. "Water" in the first line and "alterations" in the last share an ending (wa-ter, al-ter), so the poem finishes on a faint echo of how it began, and its shape becomes the cycle it describes. The long vowels of "water," "song," "enough," "world" and "made" give the lines an unhurried, humming quality, and the m-sounds of "music," "imaginable" and "made" tie the last two couplets together. The rhythm is uneven but patterned. Each couplet pairs a longer line with a shorter one: "water goes to water again" is followed by the clipped "and I to song," and the nine-syllable "and all the imaginable world" is followed by the shorter "made of alterations." The shorter lines feel like exhalations, and the missing punctuation lets the poem flow without a hard stop, much like water.
The imagery is spare. Only water, the ear and the world appear, and there is nothing to look at, which is fitting for a poem so concerned with listening. The scale grows quietly from an element, to a person, to a whole world, two lines at a time.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it says in so little space. It does not argue that art matters or describe a feeling at length. It makes a statement of purpose so plain that it almost disarms you, and it supports the statement with a view of reality as constant change. A reader may well finish it wondering what they would put in place of "music" in the line "to live for ___ is enough," which may be the most lasting thing about it.