We usually hear "the first day of the rest of your life" as a pep talk, something said with a smile to people at a turning point. Dave Bonta takes the phrase, makes it his title, and then sends its speaker off to a funeral. The new beginning is real, but it begins in black.
The title is not separate from the poem. It is the opening of the sentence, and the first line picks it up with the subject quietly dropped: "On the first day of the rest of my life [I] put on a new black suit." The poem has only six short lines and no full stop, so it runs as one unbroken thought that stops without finishing. The suit is "new," which is a small surprise. Mourning clothes are usually what we already own, pulled out for an occasion we did not choose. This speaker has bought a suit for the occasion, so the grief looks deliberate, almost a ritual of his own making. The poem does not say who or what has died. It says only what he is in mourning "for": a list of losses, and none of them is a person.
The first loss is "storms that have driven me." The verb is ambiguous. Storms drive ships, and they also drive people to act, so the speaker has been pushed along by turbulence, and perhaps given his energy by it. The line stops before saying where he was driven, and with no punctuation the next line slides straight in: "driven me / invitations to wonder." Read that way, the storms almost delivered invitations to him, like a weather system with a postman's job. Read as a list instead, the "invitations to wonder" are a second thing lost. "Wonder" also works two ways. It can mean awe, or it can mean the restless questioning of someone still unsure. Both fit a life shaken by storms, and both are now gone.
The final loss is the strangest and the most important: "the great wound / I did not hope to save." We expect people to want a wound healed, so mourning its disappearance is a paradox. The phrasing is odd too, because you save a person or a keepsake, not an injury. The line could mean he never expected the wound to survive, or that he never wanted to be saved from it. Judging by the poem's logic, the wound was the source of the storms and the wonder. It was painful, but it kept him alive in a particular way, and its passing leaves a quiet that feels like bereavement.
The form carries this mood. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines are short, mostly six or seven syllables, which gives them a bare, spoken feel. The poem is written entirely in lower case, apart from the "I." Within that plainness, the sounds do careful work. "Wonder" and "wound" share their opening sound, which links the two things the speaker most misses. The last line, "I did not hope to save," is made of one-syllable words, and it moves slowly, as though each word were being set down on purpose. Just before it, "the great wound" is two heavy stresses with almost no softness between them. The open ending, with no full stop, suggests that the day, and the grieving, is only starting.
The poem matters because it will not accept the neat story about recovery. Self-help language treats the past as clutter to leave behind, and leaving behind pain is meant to feel like pure relief. Bonta's speaker suggests something more honest and more uncomfortable: that calm can cost us the intensity, the questions, and even the suffering that made us feel most alive. The poem does not say he is wrong to move on, and it does not say he should have kept the wound. It lets both be true, and the black suit is how he admits that. A cliché about fresh starts is turned into a small ceremony of farewell, and in six lines the poem makes the reader notice how much of ourselves can be tied up in what hurts us.