Turn over a stone and you find out how little you know. Dave Bonta's "In league with the stones" begins as a letter ("Dear Teju") and a walk, and the walk turns into an argument about what humans are and what they are not. The poem never says who Teju is, but the letter form gives it a relaxed, thinking-aloud voice. The speaker is not delivering a lecture. He is reporting what he saw and letting his opinions form as he goes.
The first image sets the terms: "Rocks are the roofs of a city / we barely know." Lifting a rock becomes an act of intrusion, and what it reveals is modest: burrows, and "a colony of ants frantic / at the sudden inversion." The word "inversion" is dry and scientific, but the ants' panic makes it funny and a little guilty. The talus slope is described as "a puzzle that was put together wrong / 8,000 years ago" that has "settled into its own kind / of rightness." That paradox is an early hint of the poem's thinking. Something can be wrong by human standards and still be complete on its own terms.
The bear's trail shows this most vividly. Its "cairns of bear shit," pitted with black cherry stones, are a joke at the expense of human monument-building, since a cairn is normally a trail marker we make. The bear has made its own, and the claw that flips the rocks is "expert." The speaker contrasts it with the person who would put a flipped rock back, "uneasy at the way / our grotesque bodies no longer / quite fit into the matrix." That is a sharp piece of self-criticism. Our urge to tidy up, he suggests, comes from feeling like outsiders.
From here the poem turns to an argument. "Birds have nests, / foxes have holes" echoes a familiar line from the Gospels about creatures having homes. Here it is used to claim that "culture / is not a thing unique to humans." The line "The song that makes the songbird / must be taught" supports this, and "Instinct borrows / always from improvisation — / the true two-step" gives the idea a light, dancing image. Even the dash before "the true two-step" seems to pause for a beat before the step.
The poem is written in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its rhythm comes from enjambment and from sentences that spill over line breaks. "A colony of ants frantic" hangs for a moment before "at the sudden inversion" lands. The ampersands ("& note," "& fabricates") give the page a scribbled, notebook look that suits a letter written outdoors. The vocabulary mixes registers: "talus," "matrix," and "inversion" sit beside "bear shit" without any embarrassment. The poem treats the field guide, the philosophy seminar, and the casual aside as parts of one voice.
The ending reworks the poem's opening. It began with a "city / we barely know" beneath the rocks. Near the close it mentions "our made world's / humdrum El Dorados," the legendary city of gold, as the false cities humans chase. The child "too young / to hunger" for them stands in the creek with a stick. The earlier landscape was "dry" twice over, "a dry ridgetop / at the end of a dry month," so the "teeming, pulsing flow" arrives as a real release. The child's actions are described in the language of writing: she "punctuates / & fabricates." The stick works like a pen, and the creek is the page it writes on.
After arguing that humans are not so special, the poem then insists they are wondrous after all. The wonder it finds is imagination, the ability to "project dreams" onto the world, rather than culture, which animals share. The final exclamation, "this human / being!", breaks across a line so that "being" stands alone, and the word means both a person and the plain fact of existing.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses both easy positions. It does not praise humans at nature's expense, and it does not sulk about how awkwardly we fit in. It gets from a lifted rock to a child's stick in about forty lines, and by the end the claim that this is "more wondrous / than any gold" seems earned rather than simply stated.