Two people share one windbreaker on the top deck of a ferry at night, close enough that their bodies are pressed together. One of them is somewhere else entirely. That gap between physical closeness and mental distance drives "First fiction," and Dave Bonta lets it surface only in the last few lines, with a quiet joke at the speaker's expense.
The speaker is thinking about "the ex-governor / who had sailed / a thousand / years before / into this same / headwind." The details (a former governor, a voyage back from Shikoku, a log kept by a woman who never existed) seem to point to the Tosa Diary, the classical Japanese travel diary that Ki no Tsurayuki wrote in the voice of a woman. The poem never names it, which suits the speaker's drifting, half-private reverie. A reader who doesn't recognise the reference still gets the essentials: a man long ago chose to write as a woman, and that choice interests the speaker. The title explains the interest. The diary is a "first fiction" because it began with a man pretending to be someone else.
The form mimics the ferry's motion. Lines rarely run past four words, and many have only two or three, so the poem is a single long sentence chopped into small, swaying pieces. Nothing rhymes, and there is almost no punctuation except a few commas and one dash. Because the syntax never settles, the reader is carried along rather than allowed to stand still. The line breaks also do small bits of work. "The two / of us wrapped" holds the couple together across a break, and "rocked & buffeted" tosses the reader sideways just as the headwind does. The ampersands, which appear three times, give the voice a casual, scribbled feel, as if the poem were itself a quick log entry.
The imagery is spare but well chosen. "Headwind" is the one piece of weather, and the phrase "this same headwind" collapses a thousand years into a single gust. The speaker and the ex-governor are in the same stretch of sea, pushing against the same resistance. The best word in the poem may be "salt." The imagined woman will "salt" her log with songs and poems, which suggests seasoning and preserving, and the sea that surrounds the whole scene supplies the other meaning. Her writing is both flavoured and kept from spoiling by the very element it travels through.
Then comes the dash, and the poem turns. "& she, whose name / signified safety, / place of refuge" could be read as the ex-governor's invented diarist, but the context suggests she is the person under the windbreaker. The poem gives us the meaning of her name and withholds the name itself, as if the speaker were translating her. A name that means shelter fits someone wrapped in the same jacket, and it also quietly rebukes a man who is, mentally, out at sea.
The final image reverses the poem's own logic. The speaker has been inventing a woman's thoughts, just as the ex-governor did. Now he invents hers: "thinking perhaps / that I was proving / more difficult / than she had / imagined." The word "perhaps" matters. He cannot know what she thinks, so he is writing fiction again, and it is fiction in which he is the problem. The verb "imagined" echoes the governor's act of imagining a woman and hands the power of imagination to the person he has been neglecting.
That reversal is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats literary history as something that can drift into an ordinary evening and make a person slightly absent. It also admits that a man who imagines women, in a diary or in a poem, should expect to be imagined back. The ending is gentle and self-mocking, and it leaves the speaker, the ex-governor, and the woman beside him all adrift in the same wind.