A man puts on his best suit and goes to a funeral where the dead is a flower. The first three lines set up a solemn occasion, and then the last words tip it into something close to absurd: "an ordinary blue flower." Nobody would dress up for that. The speaker does, and the poem never explains why. It simply lets the gesture stand, tender and a little ridiculous, and the rest of the poem shows what that gesture is really for.
The title helps. "The forgetting of things past" turns around a familiar phrase, "remembrance of things past," known from Shakespeare's sonnets and as an English title of Proust's great novel. Where that phrase promises that memory will rescue what time takes, Bonta's title promises the opposite. Forgetting is the default, and the poem is its small ceremony. The flower is a good choice for this, because it is not a famous rose or a symbolic lily. The word "ordinary" is doing real work. This is the kind of thing that vanishes without anyone noticing, so the funeral becomes an act of attention that the world will not repeat.
Then the poem changes its pronoun. The "I" of the first stanza gives way to "we": "we do not live in the light / and come to forget everything." The private joke of the suit becomes a statement about everyone, and the flower starts to look like a stand-in for us. The phrase "in the light" can be read several ways, as daylight, as awareness, or as the clarity in which things are remembered. Judging by the context, the poem seems to suggest that our ordinary state is dimness, and that forgetting is built into it. There is also a quiet pun in "come to forget." We usually "come to" when we wake up, and here waking leads only to losing everything.
The last stanza brings in a stranger figure: "a coachman cannot know us / where we were." A coachman is someone who carries people from place to place and sees them only in passing. He is an old-fashioned image, and it gives the poem a faint sense of a vanished world. It could point to a driver of funeral carriages, or readers may hear an echo of the ferryman of death in older stories, though the poem never says so. Either way, the sentence is built to be unsettled. "Where we were" can attach to the coachman's ignorance ("he cannot know us in the places we used to be") or hang loose as its own fragment, a small shrug toward the past. The poem does not choose. What is clear is that whoever carries us onward will not carry our history, and nobody who meets us later will know who we were.
The form carries this feeling. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the poem has no punctuation at all. Sentences begin in lower case and end without full stops, so nothing is ever properly closed, which suits a poem about things trailing off. The stanzas shrink, from three lines to two to two, and the lines are short and plain, in the voice of someone speaking quietly. The first stanza's lines stretch a little, from "I put on my best suit" to the longer, slower "of an ordinary blue flower," where the long vowels in "blue flower" almost sound like a sigh. Sound repeats gently in the b's of "best," "burial" and "blue," as if the ceremony has its own small music. The poem ends on the shortest line of all, "where we were," whose three w-sounds fade out like a voice dropping away. The final image is the sound of forgetting.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to say whether forgetting is a tragedy or a mercy. The speaker's good suit suggests that it deserves respect, and the flat statement that "we do not live in the light" suggests it is simply how things are. In a handful of lines, the poem moves from a funeral for something nobody would grieve to a funeral for everything we lose, including ourselves. It also shows that attention itself can be a kind of memorial, even when it comes too late and the thing remembered is only a blue flower.