Two people meet at night in a church, and within eight short lines everything they said to each other has been rained away. "Assignations" has almost no plot, so its interest lies in the kind of need that drives the meetings. The title is the first clue. An assignation is a secret appointment, usually between lovers, and the word suggests arrangement and darkness together. Dave Bonta gives us no names, no reasons and no setting beyond the church. That withholding is part of the effect: the meetings feel private, and we read from the doorway.
The poem's strangest and most memorable line is "to free our hands of death." Hands touch, build and pray, so wanting them free of death sounds like wanting a touch that isn't haunted by endings. It could equally hint at guilt, since stained hands are an old image. The poem never decides, and the church "red with need" works the same way. Red can suggest blood, desire, candlelight or shame. Because the building itself is coloured by the feeling, the need seems to fill the whole place rather than belong to two people. Judging by that image, the lovers use each other, and the sacred space, as a defence against mortality.
The form is tightly controlled. There are four couplets, no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so the poem seems to be murmured rather than declaimed. Lines are short, mostly four to six syllables, and the one expansive line is "blessed as a swan in the palace," the only moment of ease. Sound follows meaning closely. "Red with need" shuts on a hard *d*, like a door closing. "Building only to go bust" is full of *b*'s, and "bust" lands bluntly, as a collapse should. In the swan line the sounds soften into *s* and *l*, so the language briefly turns luxurious. At the end, "words washed" brings in a wet, sliding *w*, and the line seems to dissolve as it is read.
Grammar adds to this. "Met" is the only finite verb in the poem. After it come participles and infinitives: "building," "holding on," "to free," "washed out." Nothing is anchored to a specific moment, as if the affair has slipped out of ordinary time into the loop of memory, a repeated cycle of building and failing.
The vocabulary mixes registers in a way that sets the poem's tone. "Go bust" comes from the language of money, and "building only to go bust" deflates a solemn setting with the slang of failed business. Anything made out of need alone, the line implies, will not hold. Then comes "holding on," the shortest stanza, a clutch more than a sentence. After freeing their hands, the pair use them to grip each other.
The swan simile cuts both ways. Swans suggest whiteness, grace and, popularly, devoted pairs, and "blessed" sets that purity against the red of the church. But a swan in a palace is also an ornament, sheltered and kept. Its safety is a little unreal, and the next couplet puts the lovers outside under rain. There is a further echo. The swan is traditionally said to sing once before it dies, and the poem's next words are "our last words." That link is an inference rather than something the poem states, but it fits so well that the swan reads as a quiet prophecy of ending.
The final image does the most work. "Washed out" can mean faded like colour, which recalls the red of the opening, or cancelled, as an event is rained off. Rain also cleanses, so the erasure might be a kind of absolution as well as a loss. Either way, the poem ends on what is *not* left: no record, no letter, no proof of the last conversation, which suits a secret meeting.
The poem is significant for its economy. In eight lines it holds the erotic, the religious and the financial, and it treats love as a defiant, partly desperate attempt to hold off death, with a moment of grace but no rescue. It offers no moral and no consoling explanation. Because so much is left unsaid, readers can fill the gaps with their own versions of the story, and the rain does the rest.