A letter that opens "Dear Dana and Blythe" promises news, and Dave Bonta's "Storm chronicle" begins by delivering it in an easy, confiding voice: the storm woke the speaker three times, and close lightning is "a fact of life here on the mountaintop." The title promises a record of events. What the poem actually offers is an account of how badly the speaker could record anything. That gap between chronicle and confusion is the poem's real subject.
The central idea is that perception, whether of a storm or of oneself, arrives in fragments that resist being assembled. The lightning gives the speaker only brief glimpses, "the apparition of trees, yard, porch / all much too brief for my slow pupils / to shrink and take in." The pun on "pupils" is quietly funny, since the eye is slow and so, in a way, is the student of the world. Darkness and rain then do the opposite job, "freeing" him from "the labor of seeing" and "from listening." That compressed phrasing, where one verb serves two ideas, makes the senses sound like chores the storm has temporarily cancelled. A few lines later comes a small aphorism: "Awakening is rarely a rapid thing; / dawning can't be rushed." It describes a tired man at dawn, but the wording also invites us to hear a larger sense of awakening, as understanding.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It moves like speech, and its line breaks are used with care. "When I finally got up," sits alone as a short, heavy line, as if standing took effort. Breaking "pocket / notebook" across two lines makes the reader wait for the notebook, just as the speaker fumbles for it in the dark. The ampersands ("came & went, came & went") give the text a hurried, handwritten look, as though we are reading the notebook itself. The repeated "came & went" imitates the flicker it describes, and the stepped times, "4:00, / at 4:30, at 5:00," show a night broken into small, tiresome pieces. Even the sound helps: "weariness flooded every muscle" puts a flood into the body before the rain gets going on the roof.
The imagery turns most inventive when the speaker looks at what he wrote. Writing blind, he made lines that overlap "as if on a palimpsest," the old term for a manuscript scraped and written over so that earlier text shows through. His "ballpoint arabesques / interwove like fingers in hair." That simile is surprisingly tender. A page of scribble becomes something intimate, almost affectionate. Then comes a dry joke: "Flashes, but not of insight, / I appeared to have written." The cliché "flash of insight" is turned upside down, with the lightning supplying the flashes and the thinking left out.
The three fragments that follow, "Ark of the Covenant — talking drums — / dyslexia of dark & light," read like words fished from the tangled page, though the poem never says so outright. Judging by the imagery, thunder is being imagined as sacred and dangerous (the Ark), as a message in code (talking drums), and as a failure of reading (dyslexia), in which light and dark swap places like jumbled letters. Each phrase tries to name the storm, and each gets only part of the way, which is the point.
The ending is the poem's best move. After all this grandeur, the speaker offers a flat confession: "I am a cipher to myself." A cipher is both a secret code and a zero, so he is unreadable and perhaps a little empty. Then, with a shrug, he adds, "At least / the storm passed." The comfort is real but small. The weather has cleared, and the self has not.
The poem matters because it is honest about the limits of writing. It would have been easy to turn a thunderstorm into a grand statement. Instead the poem keeps the failed notes, the tiredness, and the joke at its own expense, and it finds meaning in that mess. It suggests that being unable to read ourselves clearly is ordinary, and that a poem can come out of that very confusion.