Rain on a window wakes the speaker and sets off a memory, though it turns out to be a memory of something that never happened. The boyhood friend who tossed gravel at the glass is one "I never had." That small admission carries the whole poem. A lonely child, or the adult remembering him, imagines the signal so vividly that he starts acting as if it had come. The central idea is that longing can create its own contact with the world, and the world, mysteriously, sometimes answers.
The way the opening sentence is built makes this quietly startling. It spills across a stanza break: "a boyhood friend // I never had who'd toss gravel." For one line we believe in the friend, and then the next line takes him away. The poem never explains the loss, but the plain delivery lets the reader feel it. The rain does the friend's job, tapping at the glass, and the speaker gives himself the prompt that no one else will.
Bonta strips out nearly all punctuation and lets the ampersand do the joining, so the grammar behaves like the escape it describes. "Until I eased / myself out crept to the edge" has no comma or "and" between "out" and "crept," and the words slide together the way a boy might slither through a window. "Eased" is slow and careful, and "shimmied" is quick and bodily. The detail of the "walnut's rough trunk" gives the climb a physical texture that the reader can almost feel in the palms. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The seven tercets work as small units of movement, and the line breaks often interrupt an action at its most precarious point, as at "the edge," which is exactly where the speaker is.
The turn comes in the flattest line of the poem: "& something always was." After the earlier justification, "someone might be out there / it was worth checking," this line gives the world's reply with no fuss. The poem never says what was out there. "Rapid footsteps on the lawn" could be a prankster, and "a rustle in the compost pit" could be a raccoon or the wind. The speaker doesn't care, and neither does the poem. The phrase "I'd hear," like the later "I'd climb," puts the whole scene in the habitual past. It becomes a ritual repeated through a childhood, which makes the invented friendship feel more real than a single adventure would.
The ending moves from outside to inside. The boy returns to bed "with dirt on my feet & grass / stains on my PJs breathing hard," and the evidence is on his body, as if the night had left fingerprints. He pulls the blankets over his head and listens to "the blood drumming / behind my ears." This echoes the poem's first image. The rain "tapping on the window" has become a drumming inside his own head. The outside signal and the inner pulse sound alike, and the final contact is with himself, with the fact of being alive and frightened and thrilled. The hard consonants in "drumming" and "behind" give the last lines a thud of their own.
That is why the title "Contact" works on more than one level. It can suggest the old fantasy of a signal from elsewhere, and it also names the touch of bark, dirt, and grass, and the bodily shock of the final image. The poem never tells us whether the "something" out there was real. It treats the search as the real event, a child making himself brave by believing someone might be waiting. The poem is significant because it takes a small, strange memory, the kind most people would shrug off, and shows how much feeling it holds. It sets loneliness, imagination, and nerve beside each other and leaves them there unexplained.