A handyman fixes things, yet in Dave Bonta's poem almost nothing gets fixed. No pipe, hinge or ladder appears. What we get is a mind watching its own hands at work and noticing that the work acts as a mirror. "Material things show me / my own hand": the grammar quietly reverses the usual order. We expect a person to act on objects, but here the objects act on the person and reveal him to himself. Whatever sits in front of him, whether it resists or gives way, tells him something about the hand that handles it.
The central idea is that manual work is a form of self-knowledge, and also a form of peace. The second couplet supplies the key word, "simplicity," and then defines it: "accepting or laying aside." That is the handyman's job reduced to its essentials, taking up the part that fits and putting down the one that doesn't. The phrase is plain, but it reaches well beyond tools. Accepting and laying aside are also how people deal with worries, obligations and regrets. The poem never says which meaning it intends, and it is stronger for leaving both open.
The construction is as spare as the subject. There are four couplets of eight short lines, with no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. Without punctuation, the poem moves at a steady, unfussy pace, much like the work it describes, and each couplet works as one small unit of thought. The line breaks do real work. "Show me" hangs at the end of the first line, and the next line delivers "my own hand," the shortest line in the poem, so that the word "own" lands with weight. The sound helps too: "material," "me" and "my" echo one another, as if the speaker keeps circling back to himself.
The third couplet turns from the object to the body. The actions come "in a sequence" and are "certain as blood." This simile moves the poem from the outside world to the inside of the person. A pulse is not something you decide to do. It simply continues, and it is essential to life. By borrowing that image, the poem suggests that skill, once learned, goes into the bloodstream and becomes as reliable as breathing. The word "blood" also carries a faint seriousness, since it is the stuff of life, and it prepares the ending.
That ending changes the tone. "And o to bury the day / in a glass of wine" is the only exclamation in a calm, level poem, and the old-fashioned "o" sounds like a sigh of longing. The sentence has no real verb of action, so it reads as a wish rather than a report. The day has not necessarily ended, and the speaker is imagining the relief of its ending. "Bury" is a striking choice. It treats the day as something to be laid in the ground, finished and forgotten, with the wine as its grave. The word "bury" also begins with the same sound as "blood," and the red wine in the glass echoes that earlier blood. Judging by the imagery, the poem sets the body's steady, living rhythm against the drink that ends the day's labour. Whether this evening drink is a well-earned reward or a small escape, the poem does not say, and the uncertainty keeps the ending honest.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in barely forty words. It neither glamorises physical work nor looks down on it. It treats work as a place where a person finds out what he is, in the plain facts of picking up and putting down. Then, instead of ending on a lesson, it lets the speaker want a drink. That human, slightly weary wish stops the poem from becoming a sermon on the dignity of labour. Even a day of certain, blood-steady actions, it suggests, is something a person may want to bury at the end.