Omar Khayyam's name hangs over this tiny poem like a label on a bottle. In Edward FitzGerald's celebrated English version of the Rubaiyat, the ideal outing is "A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou." Dave Bonta keeps two of those ingredients, drops the bread and the beloved, and does something stranger with what remains. "Redux" means "brought back," but what comes back has been quietly rearranged.
The first stanza is a bare inventory: "a bottle of wine and a book." It has no capital letter, no verb and no full stop, like a note jotted at the top of a page. The surprise comes in the second stanza: "to my great joy I could not finish / either little world." We expect a poem about pleasure to celebrate consuming, draining the glass and reaching the last page. Bonta celebrates the opposite. Failure to finish is the source of joy, because a bottle and a book turn out to hold more than one sitting can use up. Calling each a "little world" makes them miniature universes, and a world is not something you get to the end of in an evening. The phrase is also affectionate. "Little" sounds like a pat on the head, as if the speaker were fond of these two small objects for being so much bigger than they look.
The ending moves from observation to prayer: "heaven make me full / and be my cellar." There is no comma, so we can't tell whether heaven is being addressed directly or the line is a more distant wish. Either way, the speaker has stopped being someone who drinks and reads and has become a vessel waiting to be filled. "Full" is the exact opposite of "finish." To finish is to reach an end, whereas to be full is to have enough without anything being used up. The last image is the most surprising. A cellar is a low, dark place, yet here it stands for heaven. The paradox suggests that the divine isn't far overhead but is a place of storage and patience, where bottles wait unopened. In Khayyam's picture the beloved sits beside the speaker in the wilderness. Here the place of "Thou" seems to be taken by heaven itself, though that is an inference from the poem's shape rather than something it states.
The sound of the poem is as carefully managed as its meaning, even without rhyme. The lines are short, mostly two to four beats, and the first has a skipping, almost song-like movement: "a BOTtle of WINE and a BOOK." Across the stanzas, "bottle" and "little" share the same ending, so the object and its description answer each other. The word "book" also has a hidden relative in "could" and another in "full," all three sharing the same short vowel. That thread leads from the thing the speaker holds, through his inability, to his final request. The l sounds in "little," "world," "full" and "cellar" make a soft, liquid texture, as though the language were being poured. Because the poem has no punctuation at all, it never fully stops, which suits its subject of unfinished things.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little room. In effect it answers a very old poetic tradition of seizing the moment and enjoying wine and verse before time runs out. Instead of urgency, it offers abundance. The speaker is glad not to have used everything up, and the poem ends by asking for a sweetness that will not run out. The tone stays light, with no solemnity and no lecture on mortality, yet the closing prayer gives the whole thing an unexpected depth. A student might notice that the poem itself behaves like its own subject. It is a small bottle of a poem that cannot be drained at one reading, and each return finds a little more in it.