Nobody expects the word "spiritual" to be followed by "liver," and that small collision drives Dave Bonta's four-line poem. "I get spiritual about" is how people talk about a favourite song or a certain kind of weather. It sounds casual, a little self-mocking. Then comes the most unglamorous noun available. The title doesn't say whether this is liver on a plate or liver in the body, and the poem never quite decides. The images that follow lean towards the organ, but the eater's version lingers at the edges, as if the speaker were at the dinner table and in the anatomy lesson at once.
What the poem is really about, I think, is where the sacred might live: not up in the clouds but low, dark and inside us. Every image pulls a lofty word down into the flesh.
The second line, "that lone wing," does the oddest work. A liver is broad, flat and lobed, so a wing is a plausible shape for it, and "lone" fits too, since the body has only one. But a wing suggests flight, birds, angels, and this one is buried in darkness and goes nowhere. It is a wing with no sky. A reader who knows the Greek myth of Prometheus, whose liver is torn at by an eagle, may catch a faint echo of wing and liver together. The poem doesn't ask for it, so I'd call it a possible overtone rather than an instruction.
Then comes the poem's only simile: "like a dark home." The leap is dreamlike, a wing turning into a house, and neither image explains the other. They sit side by side. Yet "dark home" quietly changes the feeling. The liver stops being a part of the body and becomes a place inside it, somewhere to live, though not a cosy one. The darkness reads literally, since the organ is deep reddish-brown and hidden from light, and also as mystery.
The last line is the richest and the least certain. "Settling accounts with someone below" packs in several senses of "settling": paying a debt, sediment sinking to the bottom, a person settling into a house. That last sense links back to "home," while the second keeps tugging downward. "Accounts" brings in ledgers and grievances. One could connect that to the liver's work of processing what the body takes in, but that is my inference, since the poem never mentions it. And who is "someone below"? Not "something," but a person. It might be the dead, a figure from an underworld, or a lower part of the self. The poem withholds the answer. Its grammar withholds too. With no punctuation, it is unclear whether the wing, the home or the liver is doing the settling, and the sentence slides forward without a stop to fix it.
The form supports this slipperiness. There is no rhyme, and the only capital is the pronoun "I." The lines run long, short, short, long, with roughly eight syllables, then three, then four, then nine. The two short lines are packed with heavy stresses, "lone wing" and "dark home," slow and weighty like two footsteps down a stair. Then the final line tumbles through unstressed syllables and lands on "below." Sound ties the poem together quietly. The l of "liver," "lone" and "like" gives the opening a soft, liquid feel. The long o of "lone," "home" and "below" links the middle of the poem to its ending. The s of "spiritual," "settling" and "someone" adds a hush, as if the speaker were lowering his voice.
For such a small poem, it sets up a clear vertical axis. "Spiritual" and "wing" point up, "home" and "below" point down, and the poem ends on the downward word. Its spirituality is not purified or distant. It is bodily, dark, even transactional. The tone also stays balanced between joke and sincerity. "Get spiritual" has a shrug in it, yet the images are too strange and carefully placed to be only a gag. That uncertainty is what makes the poem worth rereading.