Four couplets, and one word begins almost every line that matters: fire. Dave Bonta's "Life cycle" never says what the fire stands for, so the reader has to work it out from where the fire is. It starts in a blaze of publicity, drops into the crowd, then under our chairs, and ends as a thin figure walking away. The title suggests a biology diagram, but the stages run downhill from glory to bareness, with a hint that the story may not end there.
The opening couplet is the loudest. "A fire on fire" folds back on itself, as if the flame were so intense it burned twice. Then comes "blown up into uncommon fame," where "blown up" does double duty. A photograph or a balloon is blown up, and so is a building. Both meanings fit, since fame inflates things and can also wreck them. The grammar matters too. The fire doesn't rise to fame, it is blown up into it, and something outside the fire does the blowing. "Uncommon" plays against the plainness of the element itself, because fire is about as common as a thing can be. Judging by the wording, the poem is already a little suspicious of the spotlight.
Then the fire moves inward. "Fire in the people" is hidden and widely spread, and the next line, "something nobody knows," stays pleasingly slippery. It could mean the fire itself is unknown, or that the thing in the people is a secret even to them. Either way, the fame of the first stanza is replaced by anonymity. The third couplet pulls the reader in with the poem's only "our": "fire under our own seats / pretending to sleep." The phrase echoes the idiom about lighting a fire under someone, but here the fire is already there, banked and smouldering. "Pretending to sleep" gives it a personality, a patient trickster, though the grammar leaves room for us to be the ones pretending. The sibilance of "seats" and "sleep" has a hush that suits a fire kept low.
The last couplet is the strangest. "Fire gone out on foot" can mean extinguished, since a fire goes out. It can also mean a fire that has left the house and set off walking, with legs of its own. "Naked and thin" strips it further, to a body with no fuel and no costume, and it is the only stanza with no crowd and no audience. The poem's final word is itself thin, a short vowel and a quick stop. Because the title promises a cycle, I read the ending as an open one. A fire that walks is still going somewhere, and something that thin could be carried and started again.
The construction supports this reading. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letter, so the poem seems to hand out its images quietly and let the reader connect them. Almost nothing here is a full sentence. Most lines are noun phrases with a participle attached, like "blown up," "gone out" and "pretending," which makes them read like captions or specimen labels in a field guide, and that fits the title. The line lengths do their own work. After the first couplet, every second line shrinks to exactly three words: "something nobody knows," "pretending to sleep," "naked and thin." The poem loses weight as it goes, the way its fire does. The repeated "fire" works like a refrain, and what changes is the preposition that follows it: on, in, under, out. Each preposition shifts the fire's position, from surface to interior to underneath to away.
Part of the poem's interest lies in how little it fixes. The fire could be talent, anger, belief, a political movement or a single life, and the poem doesn't choose. What it offers is a shape, in which visibility and intensity don't travel together. The famous fire is a spectacle, while the unknown one in the people and the one smouldering under the seats may be the more dangerous. The final fire, bare and walking, suggests that what survives is leaner than what was celebrated. In eight short lines the poem lets one repeated word change its meaning four times without losing its identity, and that is a good reason to read it slowly.