Praise is supposed to feel good, but the compliment at the centre of Dave Bonta's "Another Good Question" lands more like a diagnosis. "That's a good question!" is what everyone says, and the speaker knows what the phrase leaves out: the question goes on tormenting you "in secret," with "its indifference and its perplexing transformations." The poem's central idea is that a real question is not a stepping stone to a conviction. A conviction offers a "warm glow." A good question offers restlessness, and the poem asks whether we would be happier without it.
The construction is the cleverest part. The poem opens with a block of prose, confident and declarative, which even answers its own rhetorical questions ("Wouldn't you rather be numb? Sure you would."). Then the same material is broken into four unrhymed quatrains, and now everything is a question and nothing is answered. The poem first claims that good questions don't resolve, then shows it by dissolving its own certainties into questions. The quatrains repeat phrases from the prose almost word for word: "uninterrupted sleep," "jarring realignment of molecules," "hot iron fry pan." This echoing feels like the poem's own version of a question that keeps returning in new forms. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only long, speech-like lines, and the "Why" that opens line after line gives the opening stanzas the nagging rhythm of a child who won't stop asking. Even the ampersands in the verse section ("round & whole") make the voice a little more casual and private than the prose.
The imagery is domestic and slightly comic, which keeps the poem from sounding pompous. "Living with the questions is like living with a house full of cats": cats are independent, indifferent, always underfoot, and never obedient. They also wake you at night. The second image is much more violent. A hot iron frying pan plunged into water makes a hiss and a shriek, and the speaker's name for it is oddly scientific, "a brief and jarring realignment of molecules." The clinical phrase set beside the kitchen scene makes the moment of becoming numb sound both ordinary and a little frightening. The squeal also changes between versions. In the prose it is one "no real voice can begin to answer," while in the last line it is "inhuman." Either way, it sounds like something that is not quite a person.
The moth and moon image deserves a slower look. The speaker wishes the question would "impart an incandescent glow / & draw lost moths to its semblance of a moon." But a moth drawn to a "semblance" of the moon is a moth fooled by a lamp. The wished-for glow of certainty is therefore faintly suspect, even as the speaker longs for it. The next question, "Why can't it stay round & whole?", fits this reading. A question seems complete from a distance, like the moon, and breaks into "so many others the closer you get." Judging by the imagery, the speaker half knows that wholeness is exactly what a question can't give.
The final quatrains turn darker and funnier together. When "a theologian advocates living with the questions," the speaker wonders whether he has "a house full of cats," a gentle jab at advice that sounds wise from a distance. Then comes the bleakest line: "What if all the best questions led only to despair?" The poem never answers it. The last stanza only asks how to be rid of such questions without the squeal, and then asks who could answer that.
The title carries a small irony, because "Another Good Question" uses the same phrase the poem has been distrusting, the polite phrase people say "instead of simply admitting 'I don't know.'" The poem seems to know it is complicit. Its significance lies in this honesty. Plenty of writing praises curiosity, but this poem counts the cost in lost sleep, in discomfort, and in the temptation to switch the whole thing off. It ends open, as its subject demands, and a tidy answer would have made the poem a lie.