Dave Bonta's poem starts with a blunt question: when a scholar's eyesight fails, "what good are his books?" The answer is unsettling. The library does not simply go dark. It turns "as unreadable / as Lascaux," the cave in France whose walls are covered with painted animals. A shelf of books becomes a wall of "scriptless drama of shapes," beautiful but with no key to read it. The second half moves from the scholar to the speaker, a younger person who briefly lent him their eyes. That shift turns a meditation on blindness into a confession about what reading aloud does to the things we love.
The poem is built in two unrhymed stanzas of twelve lines each, a balance that sets the old man's world against the young speaker's. There is no regular meter. The rhythm comes from syntax and line breaks that cut phrases mid-thought: "tissue / of allusions," "to capture is / to kill it." Those breaks make the reader hesitate in the same place the thought does. Against this loose, flowing movement, the short flat sentences stand out like verdicts: "Decipherment leads to loss." "The dance must be primary, he wrote." The second of these carries an irony the poem leaves in plain view. The scholar argues that living movement matters more than the written record, and he does so in writing.
The imagery of the first stanza fuses books with bodies and with hunting. The cave's art is "unglossed within the viscera," as if the library were an animal's insides. The word "quarry" works two ways. It can mean the hunted animal of the cave paintings, and it can mean a source from which material is dug out, as scholars dig out quotations. When the quarry "still bristles / with bookmarks," I picture a wounded beast stuck with arrows, though that is my reading of the image. "Tissue of allusions" adds to the effect, since tissue is both flesh and woven fabric. Then comes the central idea: the world is "flux," always "becoming," and "to capture is / to kill it." Every act of reading, glossing or interpreting pins down something that was alive.
The second stanza tests that idea through the speaker. As "amanuensis," a scribe or reader for someone else, the speaker feels "of little use, a cheap fiction." The accent is a good detail. A "West Coast accent" flattens words the scholar loved and "robbed them / of shadows." The comparison that follows is exact: it is like "trading embossed / leather covers for a paperback spine." Embossed leather has relief and casts shadows, while a paperback is smooth and disposable. The loss is physical as well as literary. A voice can fail to carry what the page held, just as the page failed to carry the living world.
The ending is the poem's strangest and most memorable moment. The speaker imagines the scholar sensing "the germ / I carried on my youthful breath." Breath is what turns text into speech, so it makes sense that it carries the contamination. The poem does not say what the germ is. Judging by the next lines, it may be the thinness of a paraphrase, "insidious as any misty paraphrase," since "misty" also suggests breath on cold air. It could also be the speaker's youth itself, the arrival of a generation that will read differently. Then the poem lands on "corrosive as hope." Hope is usually the consoling word, and here it is something that eats away. I can only guess why. Perhaps hope tempts us to believe that reading aloud, or deciphering, can restore what has been lost, and that belief is the damaging thing.
The poem matters because it will not offer comfort. It might have mourned a scholar's failing sight in a familiar, sentimental way. Instead it asks whether any act of capturing, whether writing, reading, explaining or translating, spares what it touches. It also implicates itself, since a poem is another way of pinning something down. The number in the title suggests it belongs to a longer sequence on perception, but it stands well alone. Its closing word leaves the reader unsure whether hope would be a rescue or the last symptom.