Four short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still a whole drama of walls and openings. In "Cloistered," Dave Bonta puts a person behind a closed door and then, almost casually, lets the night walk straight through it.
The title does a lot of work before the first line begins. A cloister suggests deliberate withdrawal: monks, cells, silence, a life arranged around study. In architecture, though, a cloister is also a covered walkway open on one side to a garden, a space both enclosed and exposed. The poem seems to live in that double meaning. The speaker has chosen the enclosure, since "where I shut myself in" makes him his own door-closer. Yet the very next line reverses the situation: "the night lay open."
The line breaks enact this. The first line ends on "in," a small, closed syllable. The second ends on "open," and the reader's eye drops into the white space after it, as if a door had swung wide. The poem never says the night came in or that the speaker went out. The night is simply there, available, unshut.
The syntax is deliberately slippery. With no punctuation, "where I shut myself in" can lean forward or back, and "that impossible hand" can sit as a kind of label for the night or for what it offers. Two meanings of "hand" seem to be in play. "Lay open" is what a book does, and "hand" can mean handwriting, as in someone's "neat hand." Read this way, the night is a page written in an impossible script, too vast or too strange to decipher. That would explain the final line, because the speaker is trying to read it. But a hand can also be an open palm, offering something or asking for something, and "impossible" might then mean too large to take or too strange to believe. The poem refuses to choose, and the refusal is part of its pull.
"Impossible" is also the only word of more than two syllables in the poem, and it lands like a stumbling block among plain monosyllables. It is the sole evaluative word, the one place where the speaker admits to being overwhelmed. He does not explain what is impossible about the hand, only that it is.
The last line sits alone, a stanza of one: "I read and read and read." After three lines of varied phrasing, the rhythm goes flat and repetitive. Every word but "and" is a monosyllable, and the syllable count (six, five, six, six) barely changes, so the final line feels slower and heavier than its neighbours. The repeated "and" works like a turning page, or like a mind circling the same thought. The white space before it works like a pause before the effort begins. Notice also that "read" looks identical in present and past tense. On the page, we cannot tell whether the reading is happening now or has long been going on, and the uncertainty makes it feel endless.
What is being read? The poem never says, and that gap is where the tension lies. Perhaps the speaker reads books in his shut room while the night pulls at him from outside. Perhaps the night is itself the text. Perhaps reading is a way of facing the impossible hand, or a way of avoiding it. The hard stops of "shut," "night," "that," "hand" and "read" close the lines like latches, and yet the meaning keeps slipping out between them.
There is no rhyme here and no regular metre. The poem relies on line breaks, sound and silence to do what a longer poem might do with argument. That compression is what makes it worth reading. It captures a familiar human contradiction, the wish to retreat into solitude and the discovery that solitude is never sealed, in the space of a breath. The poem itself becomes a small cloister, four lines with one side open to the dark, and the reader is left, like the speaker, reading and reading.