Noon is supposed to be the hour when everything stands upright, with the sun at its highest and shadows at their shortest. Dave Bonta's "Pliable" heads the other way. In four unpunctuated lines, a speaker finds the day turned inside out and the body going down with it. The poem is about bending, and about how bending can feel like a gift and a defeat at once.
The first line, "times I find my head", is an unfinished thought. Find it where? Doing what? "Find my head" could mean locating something misplaced, as if the head had wandered off and turned up again. It could just as easily mean discovering what state one's mind is in. With no punctuation and no capitals except the pronoun "I", the line pours straight into the next: "I come to be more supple." You can read this as two separate statements or as one run-on in which finding the head is exactly what makes the speaker supple. The poem never chooses, and that is the point. Its grammar is as pliable as its title promises.
"Supple" is usually a word for bodies, for dancers, leather or young branches, so applying it to a head is slightly strange. The phrase "come to be" matters too. It describes something that happens to the speaker gradually, not something he decides. The soft, humming sounds support this. The m in "my," "come," "more," "midnight" and "me" runs through the poem like a drowsy murmur.
The third line is the strangest and best: "at noon doing midnight". The verb "doing" treats midnight as an activity, something you perform or put in time at, the way people say "doing time." (It faintly echoes the opening word "times," though that may be coincidence.) Noon is the sun's peak and midnight its lowest point, so the line sets the highest hour against the lowest. Either the speaker is lying in the dark at midday, or the clock itself has lost its order. The poem gives no reason, and a reader can only infer that something has knocked the day out of step.
The last line, "and the bed as fallen as me", brings in the poem's only solid object. "Fallen" carries several meanings at once: slumped, rumpled, sunken, fallen asleep, fallen down. The comparison leaves out its verb, so bed and speaker are simply equals in collapse. Notice, too, that the speaker comes last in the line, after the bed, as though the furniture were the main figure and he were its companion.
The poem's shape reinforces this slide. Counting syllables gives 5, 7, 6, 8, so the lines mostly lengthen and the final one is the longest. Its stresses are spread thin across "as fallen as me," so the voice slumps instead of striking a clear beat. There is no end-rhyme, but a quieter echo frames the poem. "Head" opens it and "bed" nearly closes it, a rhyme that moves from upright head to horizontal bed. "Be" in line two also chimes with "me" at the end. "To be" becomes "as me," and the abstract idea of becoming lands on the self.
Part of the poem's interest is that it won't say whether suppleness is rescue or ruin. Flexibility is normally praised, since the supple branch survives the wind. Here it sits next to "fallen," and the speaker's openness to change looks a lot like giving in. It could be a mind loosened by exhaustion, or by sleeplessness, or simply by a day lived in the wrong order. The poem leaves the cause unsaid, and I won't invent one. Its few words are enough to suggest an experience many readers will recognise, that of being out of step with time and a little too yielding.
For a student, the poem is a useful lesson in how much a small poem can leave to the reader. Try rereading it with a comma after "head," then without. Ask whether "supple" sounds like relief or like surrender. The meaning shifts each time, which is how a poem called "Pliable" ought to behave.