An apple fits in a palm, a bite bites back, and a bottle ends up brimming with light. In Dave Bonta's "Rubaiyat," one long appetite stretches from a cool September morning to a patient, imagined future. The poem is about wanting life with its sharpness left in, and about the clarity that comes from waiting rather than from smoothing things over.
The title sets the mood. A rubai is a Persian quatrain, and the plural, rubaiyat, is best known in English through the translation of Omar Khayyam's verses, a book associated with wine and the shortness of life. Bonta's poem is built from five four-line stanzas, so it nods to that form, but it has no rhyme, and its sentences ignore the stanza breaks. The grammar spills over each gap, as if the speaker can't stop for formalities. The tradition the title recalls is often one of seize-the-moment urgency. This poem, notably, is willing to wait.
The stanza breaks also work as small acts of suspense. The first stanza ends on "give me," and the second begins with what is wanted: "your delectable frost, fine / web of lines." The request is a kind of prayer addressed to the season itself. The same thing happens again at the end of the third stanza, with "Give it to me" and then "dry." Each time the reader hangs on the edge of a demand before it is answered. Elsewhere the line breaks act out their meaning. "Wind- / fallen" splits the word, and the apple drops across the gap. Sugar is wanted "straight, without" and the line stops, leaving that "without" as bare as the sweetness being refused.
The imagery makes the senses do the thinking. The soil has a "breath," which is a plain, almost startling way to describe morning mist rising off the ground. The forest is "in fog," with "new gold under / old green," a season turning in layers. "Delectable" is an unexpected word for frost, since it treats cold as food. Judging by the imagery, the "fine web of lines" is the frost's tracery, though it is hard not to hear a hint of lines of verse as well. Then comes the apple, which "fits / so snugly in the palm," and the poem's most surprising moment: "when I take a bite it bites back." The fruit stops being an object and becomes a participant.
From there the poem makes its one explicit argument, and it does so almost as an aside. "Who'd want their sugar / straight" is a rhetorical question with a pun inside it, since "straight" means both undiluted and unbending. The wine word "dry" takes over from the apple, and then comes the flat claim: "Impure, / like every true love." The poem hands over its belief casually, between a comma and an "And," without raising its voice. Love, like the tart apple, is better for what resists.
The last stanza turns the landscape into a vessel. "Must" is the pressed juice of fruit before it becomes wine, and the speaker lets it "settle / to the bottom / week by week." The fog from the opening returns here as the cloudiness of the liquid. As the sediment sinks, the "fog is gone," and the bottle "brims / with light!" The line break before "with light" makes the brimming literal. This is the poem's only exclamation mark, apart from the sigh of "ah," and it earns its place after so much patience. The slow phrase "week by week" stretches a single morning's walk into the long time of fermentation.
Small details keep the poem from becoming grand. The ampersands in "& when I take a bite" and "& the bottle brims" make it look quickly jotted, and the dash before "ah" catches a sigh mid-thought. The effect is of someone thinking aloud in an orchard rather than delivering a lesson.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It argues for imperfection without lecturing, and it finds clarity in time rather than in filtering things out. Bitterness, tartness and cloudiness are treated as parts of the process, not flaws in it, and the light at the end is brighter because the poem has stayed with the fog so long.