"Imponderable" is a heavy-sounding word for something so light. It describes what can't be weighed, measured or fully reckoned with, and Dave Bonta's five-line poem seems determined to show what that looks like. It offers two small, almost weightless events and then makes a bold equation: both are "the same as asking a question / in a prayer." The central idea is that some acts feel enormous and yet leave no trace, and that asking a question of whatever might be listening is one of them.
The first stanza gives two images that seem unrelated at first. "The settling of night into a hole" is vast and slow, a whole evening sinking into a small, dark space. The second, "a fly onto its supper," is tiny, quick and slightly unpleasant. The poem doesn't repeat the verb for the second image. "Settling" does double duty, so the fly's landing borrows the quiet of the night's arrival. Both are gentle, nearly silent and impossible to catch at the moment they happen. Nobody can say when night has finally settled, and nobody weighs a fly. The word "hole" is blunt and unpoetic, and "supper" is cosy and domestic, which pulls the grand and the small into the same ordinary world. Darkness settling into a hole is also darkness arriving where it already half belongs, and the poem leaves the reader to feel how odd and how inevitable that is.
Then comes the turn: "the same as asking a question / in a prayer." Prayers are usually imagined as thanks or requests, statements made with some confidence. A question inside one admits that the speaker doesn't know, and it lands in the prayer the way the fly lands on its meal or the night in its hole. The comparison suggests, though never states, that such a question makes no sound the world can measure. Judging by the images, it may be absorbed and swallowed up, perhaps answered, perhaps not. The poem leaves that open, and the openness is the point. The question is imponderable because no one can weigh it, and no one can say what happens to it afterward.
The construction supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run at the pace of speech, then the last one shrinks to the three small words "in a prayer," as though the poem itself were settling. There are no capital letters and no punctuation at all, which matters most in the second stanza: the word "question" appears, yet there is no question mark. The poem talks about asking without ever raising its voice into the shape of a question, and that hush suits a prayer. Sound helps too. "Settling," "supper," "same" and "asking" all carry soft s sounds, a faint sibilance close to whispering, so even the texture of the language seems to lower its voice.
The grammar is worth noticing as well. The poem is a single sentence with no main verb, built around "the same as." The title can be read as its missing subject, so that the whole poem works like a dictionary entry: *imponderable: the settling of night into a hole, or a fly onto its supper; the same as asking a question in a prayer.* A definition by example is a clever way to define something that resists definition. Instead of explaining what can't be weighed, the poem hands the reader three things to hold and lets each one slip away.
That is where its quiet significance lies. It is short enough to read in seconds, yet it asks the reader to complete a leap: to see why a fly, a nightfall and a prayerful doubt belong together. The poem doesn't tell us the answer to the question in the prayer, and it doesn't pretend to. By staying small, soft and unresolved, it behaves like the thing it describes, a question sent out without a question mark, with nothing promised in return.