Most pictures of contemplation put the thinker somewhere high: a hilltop, a tower, a quiet room with a view. Dave Bonta's speaker goes the other way. "In a pit I sit and think": the line seems to have sunk with him, since "pit" and "sit" chime like two stones dropping and "think" lands on the same short vowel. There is no capital letter and no full stop, so the poem begins as if the thought had been running for a while before we arrived.
What follows is the thinking, and it is odd. "Backward as water" can be read in at least two ways. The speaker may think the way water behaves, pooling and seeping toward the lowest place. Or he may think the way water shows things, in reflection, where the world appears reversed. Either way, this thought does not march forward to a conclusion. It turns back on itself. That suits the title, "Contemplative," an adjective with no noun attached. It names a state of mind rather than a person, and the poem never hardens it into an argument.
Instead we get three clauses, each starting with "how." None has a main verb of its own, so they read like objects dredged up from the bottom of the pit: how they measure and take, how nature is not conquered, how music and women give us being. The repeated "how" gives the poem a slow, accumulating pulse. The four couplets of short, unpunctuated lines keep each thought small and separate, like stones laid in a row.
The pronouns shift as the thoughts do. The poem opens on "I," moves to a vague, faintly accusing "they," and ends on "us." The "they" are never identified, so readers can fill the gap with surveyors, owners, or anyone who treats the world as something to be counted. "Measure and take" joins counting to seizing, and the poem's one true rhyme, *measure* and *pleasure*, locks the two together. The sound says what the sense claims: pleasure that has been measured turns into "a counterfeit." That word comes from the language of coins and trade, a forged note passed off as real, and it suggests pleasure that has been priced and sold.
The sounds change with the subject. The middle stanzas are full of hard *k* sounds in "counterfeit," "conquered," and "quite," which are the sounds of the grabbing side of the poem. Then "all nature" gets a line almost to itself, a large phrase left standing for a moment, before "not quite conquered yet" undercuts it with understatement. The reader has to decide what that tone means. Is it quiet comfort, from a man at the bottom of a hole, that the world still exceeds every attempt to tally it? Or does "yet" carry a threat, because the conquest is still under way? The poem lets both readings stand.
The last couplet turns on a pair of verbs. In the second stanza "they" *take*, and in the final one music and women *give*. The sounds soften too, with the humming *m* and *n* of "music and women" and the open vowels of "give us being." The word that matters most is "being." The poem does not say these things give us pleasure, which would echo the counterfeit. It says they give us existence itself, something that cannot be measured.
The claim is bold and unexplained, and a careful reader might push back. Why these two? Does naming "women" beside music make them a source of something rather than people in their own right? The poem does not defend itself, and that restraint is part of its character.
The poem is significant for how much it carries in about thirty words. It sets a low, humble place against a world of counting and taking, backward-turning thought against forward-marching acquisition, and the grim "they" against a tender "us." It reads as gloomy at the start and nearly grateful by the end, and it earns that shift through sound and line structure rather than by preaching. A poem this short can be read in seconds, but it is worth coming back to, the way one returns to the edge of a well to look at what the water has kept.