Seventeen words, five short lines, and a mountain turns out to be a person. Dave Bonta's "Unobtainable" spends nearly all of its length on a distant peak, then swings in its last three words toward someone addressed as "you". The central idea is a particular kind of desire: the kind aimed at something perfectly visible and perfectly out of reach. The peak is "often seen", so nothing is hidden and nothing needs discovering. The ache comes from the gap between looking and having.
The pivotal word is "legerdemain", the only showy word in a poem of small, plain ones. It comes from the French for "light of hand", and it means a conjuror's sleight. That is a surprising thing to call a mountain, since mountains are about as unmagical as things get: heavy, fixed, slow. But the poem is talking about how a peak appears, not what it is. Anyone who has watched a far ridge knows how light and clear air can pull it close, so that it seems an afternoon's walk away, while the distance stays exactly what it was. The peak performs a trick on the eye, offering nearness and withholding it. A trick also needs someone to be fooled, and the poem leaves open whether that is only the watcher or the watcher's own wishing.
The verb matters too. The poem says "impossible / ever to have", not "to reach" or "to climb". A climber can stand on a summit, but nobody can *have* one. "Have" is the language of ownership, and also of love, so by the time "you" arrives the reader sees that the verb was quietly preparing for it. The line break helps. "often seen yet impossible" almost works as a complete thought, and the break lets that flat verdict land before "ever to have" stretches it into something permanent. Placing "ever" before "to have" slows the line slightly, so it sounds like a reluctant admission.
The poem's shape suggests the same thing. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly 2, 8, 8, 4, 3. It opens with a stranded two-syllable phrase, "far off", surrounded by white space on the page, so the line itself seems to stand at a distance. Then it swells across two full lines, as if the eye were travelling up the mountain, and shrinks again to a whisper. There is no rhyme, no capital letter and no full stop. The missing full stop is the most telling gap, because the poem never officially ends, which suits a wanting that never resolves. The sound is quiet too. "Seen" and "peak" share a long, stretched vowel, and the final "you" is open enough to be held and let go, trailing away like something fading in the haze.
The ending is the cleverest move. "As are you" turns normal word order upside down (we would say "as you are"), which saves "you" for the final beat so that the person lands last, after the whole landscape has prepared for them. Grammatically it is a simile with the "like" removed: you are as impossible to have as the peak. A second reading is more unsettling. If the mountain is a piece of sleight of hand, then "as are you" might mean the beloved is a conjuring too, an appearance made of distance and longing and not entirely the real person. That is an interpretation, not a certainty, but the compressed phrasing allows it, and the poem is stronger for being able to hold both meanings at once.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have complained, pleaded or blamed, and instead it makes a calm statement, almost like a caption under a photograph. That calm lets the sadness work from underneath. The old comparison of a loved one to a lofty, unreachable height usually flatters the beloved. Here the comparison is stripped of praise, and only the inaccessibility survives. With so few words, the reader has to complete the thought, and that may be why the poem lingers: we supply the mountain from memory, then find that the person we imagine at the end belongs there too.