A walk up a hill, a sudden urge, and then a poem that never quite comes back down to earth. Dave Bonta's "Communication breakdown" begins with something almost ordinary: someone outdoors feels the pull to "call in an owl." The phrase sounds like the vocabulary of birders or hunters, people who lure creatures with a whistle or a recording. But the poem turns that practical impulse into something stranger and older. The speaker doesn't just want to summon the owl. They want to bribe it, and the bribes keep growing.
The promises begin modestly with "a cold wind / clear like the river." Then they become domestic and appetising, "a dish of fresh fish," as if the owl were a guest at dinner. The last offering is the one that tips the poem into nightmare or myth: "people trimmed / into stones standing upright." Whether this suggests sacrifice, or the standing stones of ancient monuments, or simply people made silent and still, the poem leaves open. What matters is the escalation. Each gift is more human-made and more unsettling than the one before, and the tone stays perfectly calm throughout, which makes the last image colder.
The grammar helps explain the title. Almost nothing in the poem actually happens. "Call in" and "promise" are infinitives attached to an "urge," and "trimmed" and "standing" are participles describing a state. The speaker never says "I," and the only finite verb phrase in the whole poem is a negative one: the doubt "could not speak." So the communication of the title breaks down at the level of syntax. The wish to reach out never becomes an act, and the poem ends with a failure of speech.
That final stanza is also the most puzzling. "The antiquity of a doubt / that could not speak / with owls or breasts" is a strange pairing, and it works through a kind of grammatical sliding in which two unlike things sit side by side as if they were natural partners. Owls stand for the wild, the nocturnal, the nonhuman. Breasts suggest the body, intimacy and nourishment. The doubt is unable to talk to either, which hints that the failure is not only between humans and nature but between a person and their own physical, instinctive life. Calling the doubt "ancient" implies this isn't a modern malaise. Perhaps people have always stood at the edge of the dark offering gifts to something that won't reply.
The sound of the poem is as restrained as its meaning is odd. It is unrhymed free verse in six short couplets, with lines of only a few syllables, so it reads slowly, with long pauses between breaths. Enjambment keeps tugging the sentence across the gaps: "and promise it" dangles at the end of a line, waiting for its object, "a cold wind," to arrive. Within that quiet, small sound patterns do their work. "Cold" and "clear" echo each other, "dish of fresh fish" is a hush of soft sh sounds, and "stones standing upright" clicks with hard st sounds, as if the words themselves were turning to rock.
The frame is worth noticing too. The poem opens with one owl and ends with "owls" in the plural, so the particular bird on the hill has become a whole category of wild listeners who aren't answering. The last line, "the fields dark as pitch," closes the scene in blackness. "Pitch" means tar, but it is also a word for the height of a sound or voice. Whether or not that second meaning is intended, it sits well in a poem about the failure of speech. The darkness is sticky and total, and nothing in it replies.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In twelve lines it moves from a casual walk to something that feels like an ancient ritual, and it never explains the jump. It also doesn't mock the speaker's impulse to bargain with an owl. It treats that impulse as both absurd and deeply human, and it lets the silence at the end stand as the only answer.