Dave Bonta's "Distancing" begins with a small domestic scene: someone gets dressed and pours a glass of morning wine. By the last line, that scene has turned into a quiet argument about desire. The poem's central claim, which it makes sideways, is that love and worship both need a gap between the one who reaches and the thing reached for, and that closing the gap by taking, eating or possessing is a way of losing.
The poem is built from four three-line stanzas, with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. Without full stops, the reader has to decide where each thought ends, and the poem uses this on purpose. Take the first stanza: "having dressed myself I drink / my morning wine / my new book of fire." We can read "my new book of fire" as another name for the wine, so the drink is the book, something to be taken in. Or we can read it as the start of the next sentence, since "is finely bound and colored" follows directly. The line works both ways, and the poem never says which reading is right. Wine and book blur into one object that is both swallowed and read.
The language of the second stanza turns on a pair of near-opposites. The speaker has "dressed" at the start, and now says of "all the figures" that "I have undressed" them. "Figures" is a good word to leave open. It could mean the painted or printed illustrations in a finely colored book, or human bodies, or figures of speech. Judging by the imagery, the poem may be hinting that reading, looking and desiring are all forms of undressing, of stripping a thing down to get at it. The speaker's own clothing, put on neatly at the start, becomes a quiet contrast: he is covered, and the figures are not.
The turn comes in the third stanza, which names the title idea outright: "the distance between / all things in readiness / for love or worship." This stanza has no verb, so it reads as a statement set down rather than an action. The phrase "in readiness" suggests that distance is not an obstacle but a condition, the space things need before love or worship can happen. Putting "love or worship" side by side also hints that the two share a structure: one thing looks across a gap toward another.
The final stanza is where the poem bites. "So that we eat what / we think to have / and therefore part with" continues the sentence from the stanza before, so the distance exists *so that* we can eat. Eating is the ultimate closing of distance, and it is also an act of destruction. Whatever we swallow is gone. The phrase "think to have" carries doubt about whether we ever have anything, and "part with" works two ways: we give it up, and we are separated from it. Given the wine in the opening lines, a reader might also hear a faint echo of ritual meals, where eating and drinking stand for a holy closeness, though that is an inference from the imagery and the poem never says it. The poem ends on the small, unemphatic word "with," so the thought trails off as if the thing itself were slipping away.
The sound of the poem supports this restraint. The lines are short, usually three to six syllables, and the rhythm is uneven and conversational, close to speech. Yet there are quiet patterns: the long *i* in "wine," "fire" and "finely," and the *f* sounds running through "fire," "finely" and "figures." These links make the opening feel like a single, tightly held object before the later stanzas pull away from it. The echo of "dressed" in "undressed" works like a rhyme of meaning where no sound rhyme exists.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It does not lecture about longing or devotion. It lets a morning drink, a handsome book and a handful of ambiguous words add up to an uncomfortable idea: that the things we love and revere stay precious only while we leave a space around them, and that wanting to consume them is exactly what loses them. A reader who comes back to it will probably find the small first scene less simple than it seemed.