A moon in a daytime sky is easy to miss. It hangs there pale and chalky, borrowing the colour of the sky around it, and Dave Bonta opens with that fact turned into a warning: "an unexamined moon / would dissolve into noon." The "would" matters. It suggests that dissolving is what happens unless someone is paying attention. The poem is about that act of attention, and about what it costs the person who gives it.
The word "unexamined" sounds like the familiar saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. Bonta moves it from a life to a moon, and the stakes shift from moral to perceptual. Things fade when nobody looks at them. The third line then stretches the idea: the moon would dissolve "into any enemy of change." After the plain picture of noon, this phrase is abstract and a little strange, and it leaves the reader to decide who the enemies are. Noon itself is one candidate, with its flat, shadowless middle-of-the-day sameness. Habit and glare are others. The moon, which waxes and wanes, is the obvious emblem of change, so losing sight of it means losing a reminder that nothing stays put. That is an inference from the imagery, but the poem seems to invite it.
The sound of the stanza acts out the dissolving. The first two lines are short and tidy, and "moon" and "noon" rhyme fully, so they click together like a proverb. The third line refuses to finish that way. It is longer and has no rhyme, and it repeats "into" from the end of the line before, so the sentence slides forward without a break. The unstressed syllables of "any enemy of" tumble along until the single heavy word "change" stops them. Neat form gives way to blur, which is what the lines describe.
The second stanza swaps argument for scene. The wren appears without any build-up, "so matter-of-fact." The hyphenated phrase is itself matter-of-fact, three flat words pressed together. The wren doesn't examine anything, because it doesn't need to; it simply goes on being a wren. Beside it the speaker is "still and cold," two plain monosyllables, and then the line break delivers the simile: "as a dead clown." The hard *k* sound runs through "fact," "cold" and "clown," which gives the ending a dry click, like a punchline delivered deadpan.
The image is startling, funny and a little sad. A clown is a professional performer of feeling, and a dead one has lost the performance and kept only the painted face, white and fixed. That face may recall the pale moon in the sky, though the poem never says so. If the reading holds, the watcher has become a daytime moon himself, motionless, washed-out and hanging in the cold. "Cold" suggests he is outdoors, perhaps waiting and watching for some time.
The poem leaves open whether this stillness is the price of real attention or a kind of failure. Next to the busy, unselfconscious wren, the speaker looks almost like a stunt, someone who has frozen himself in order to notice. His self-mockery also keeps the first stanza from becoming pompous. Having made a grand claim about examination, he shows himself looking faintly ridiculous in the act of examining.
The poem is significant because it fits so much into so little. In eight short lines it manages a philosophical claim, a rhyme that falls apart on purpose, a small brown bird and a joke with a sting in it. It also doesn't settle its own question. A reader finishes it wondering what we let dissolve into noon through lack of looking, and what posture, however awkward, looking might require.