Eighteen words, two couplets, no punctuation: Dave Bonta's "Bon vivant" reads like a menu scribbled on a napkin, and the dish of the day turns out to be night itself. The title sets a small trap. A bon vivant is, in French, someone who lives well, a lover of good food, good drink and good company, so we expect a genial portrait of a man at a table. What we get is stranger and more interesting: a speaker who treats the dark as something to be tasted, swallowed and carved.
The first couplet gives two metaphors in a row, and they pull in opposite directions. "night is a welcome wine" is the gentle one. "Welcome" is a host's word, suggesting relief, the way an evening glass loosens the knots of the day. Then the line break and the plain little "and" bring in "a great carcass." The night is no longer a drink but a slaughtered animal, huge and heavy, like a side of beef hanging in a cold room. "Carcass" is a blunt, ugly word, all hard consonants, and "great" makes it enormous, both repellent and abundant. The poem refuses to choose between the two images. Wine is pleasure and carcass is death, and the speaker puts both on the same plate. Against the title the joke deepens, because "vivant" means living, yet what is being consumed is a dead body. Living well, the poem seems to suggest, includes feeding on what is dark and finished.
The second couplet drops from the cosmic to the domestic. "I go home to supper" is the first appearance of a person, and the language shrinks to its humblest register. "Home" and "supper" belong to a different world from "carcass." After such large metaphors, the speaker is simply someone walking back for his meal. Then comes the last line, "red as a bee." We expect "red as a rose," or even "red as wine," which would have closed the loop neatly. Bees aren't red, so the simile can't be checked against nature and has to be read by feel. Judging by the imagery already in play, the redness might be the flush of wine on a face, the blood of the carcass, or the last red light of evening. Bees also return to the hive at dusk, so the speaker heading home to supper becomes one of them, a creature coming back full of what he has gathered. That is an interpretation, not a certainty, and the poem is built to allow several.
The sound and shape support this looseness. There is no end rhyme, but the long *i* of "night," "wine" and "I" rings through the poem, tying the world and the speaker together before the final "bee" opens onto a different vowel. The rhythm moves at two speeds. "night is a welcome wine" has an easy lilt, while "and a great carcass" slows down because "great" and "car-" both demand weight, as if something heavy were being dragged into the line. The second couplet starts at walking pace, "I go home to supper," and ends in a quick four-syllable line that is over almost before we notice. Without punctuation, the white space between the couplets does the work of a full stop. The lone capital letter in the poem body is "I," a small upright figure after the sprawling night.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much attitude it packs into so little room. It rejects the polite idea of the good life as comfortable pleasure and proposes an appetite that doesn't flinch from darkness or mortality. Its last image, with the bee that isn't red, shows a poem trusting the reader to feel first and explain later. For a student learning to read poetry, that is a useful lesson: a comparison doesn't have to be logical to be right.