Five small scenes sit side by side in "Quoting myself" with no explanation connecting them: a field of bees, a bank of poppies, a talking tree, a drifting spaceship, a passing train. What links them is a mood, a wry calm about the idea that the human world is fading and something older is taking over. Dave Bonta never states this outright. He lets a joke, a slogan and a few odd images do the work.
The title is worth pausing on. Quoting yourself is a faintly comic act, a little vain and a little lonely, as if the only voice left to cite is your own. The poem is built like a set of quotations: fragments that could each be lifted out and stand alone. Judging by the title, the poet is gathering his own scraps, but the poem never says where they came from, and it doesn't need to. The collage form fits the subject. Nothing here is whole, and everything is being taken apart.
That sense of coming apart is carried by the poem's key verb. In the opening lines the speaker imagines "Peace without children, yellow field / where I dissolve, finally, into a murmur of bees." The word "finally" can be read as relief, but the phrase "peace without children" is ambiguous. It could mean a quiet that only comes when the noise of family life is gone, or a peace that is hollow because no future generation is left to inherit it. The soft, humming sounds of "murmur" and "bees" make the dissolving feel gentle, almost welcome. Then the same verb returns in the fourth section, where the "Newtonian surface" of space "dissolves around" the aging ship. The speaker melts into a field, and the universe melts around a machine. The poem keeps showing the edges of things going soft.
The imagery is at its most inventive in the poppies. Their "sea-green pods / swell like thought-balloons in the comics, / each one empty except for an asterisk." A thought-balloon is a container made for a mind, and these are blank. The asterisk is the best detail. It is the mark that promises a footnote, an explanation waiting somewhere else, but no footnote arrives. Nature offers the shape of meaning without the content, and the poem leaves us to decide whether that is disappointing or freeing.
The tone then lurches into a joke. "I'm taking this opportunity to get in touch with my roots, said the wind-thrown tree." The line is stretched out like a sentence from a story, with the speech tag trailing at the end. The pun is easy to spot: a toppled tree really does expose its roots, and the speaker borrows the language of self-improvement to describe a disaster. It is funny, but the joke is about falling over, and it quietly mocks how readily people put a positive spin on their own collapse.
The last two scenes move from the natural world into the mechanical, and both are strangely still or distant. The transport ship "floats motionless" while even the physics that describes space is losing its grip. The phrase "what / they still sometimes call outer space" has a tired, faraway "they" and an offhand "still sometimes," as if the old vocabulary were wearing out. Then comes the poem's slogan: "NATURE WILL WIN," written "in neat black letters" on a boxcar. The neatness is ironic, because a proclamation of wildness has been lettered with orderly care, and it rides on a piece of industry. The train then disappears as a "flashing orange light receding around the bend." The poem ends on a participle, a movement that is still going, with no full stop to close it. Even the messenger of nature's triumph is leaving.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady meter. Line lengths shift from the short, hushed opening to the long, talkative tree line to the slow, drifting spaceship. That variety is part of its charm, since it moves between lyric, comedy and science fiction without warning.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to sermonize. A poem about humans fading before the natural world could easily turn solemn or preachy. This one stays light on its feet, using an asterisk, a pun and a stenciled slogan to say something sobering. It leaves us unsure whether the slogan is a warning, a comfort or just another empty balloon.