Two small scenes sit side by side in Dave Bonta's "Up and down", and the poem never says how they are connected. In the first, a church is full of strangers and one face is turned upward. In the second, someone is getting a haircut in winter and talking about the history of mining. The poem asks the reader to supply the link, and the title is the best clue. One scene looks up and the other digs down. Between them they sketch the two directions in which people's attention can run: toward what is above them and toward what lies under their feet.
The first stanza is built almost entirely from stillness. "Church thronged / with strangers" has no active verb, only the participle "thronged", which makes the crowd sound packed in and fixed. The word is heavy and crowded with consonants, like the room it describes. "Strangers" is the important word here. Nobody in the pews is known to the speaker, and the crowd is a single anonymous mass until the last line picks out "one face looking up." That line works like a camera zooming in. We don't learn why the face is raised. It might be toward the ceiling, a preacher, a window, or something less definable. The poem leaves it open, and the openness is where the feeling comes from. Among all those people, one is caught in a moment of private reaching. The line also ends on "up", a short word that stops abruptly, as if the gaze had reached its limit.
The second stanza changes the grammar and the temperature. For the first time there is an "I", and he is active: "I talk about the history / of mining." The first scene was observed from outside, but this one is lived from inside. The details are small and cold. "Haircut in winter" suggests a bare neck, a cloth tucked at the collar, and the shedding of something. It is also an ordinary, slightly awkward situation where people make conversation to fill the silence. What is surprising is the topic. Mining is deep, dark, and communal, and it is as far from the lifted face of the church as the poem can get. The word "history" adds another kind of descent, into layers of the past. The line break after "history" leaves the stanza hanging until "of mining" drops in, and that is the poem's last move. It ends on "mining", a soft, nasal word that trails off, while the first stanza ended on the clipped "up". The structure itself rises and then sinks.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is loose and speech-like, though the syllable counts are worth noticing. The first stanza runs roughly two, three, then five syllables, growing as it goes, as if the eye were widening onto the single face. The second runs roughly five, seven or eight, then three, swelling into the long middle line of talk and then shrinking to "of mining." The two shapes are almost mirror images. The compression and the abrupt pairing of images recall the short Japanese-influenced forms in English, but the poem needs no label to work, because the juxtaposition does the thinking.
The best reading, I think, is that the poem sets two kinds of gathering against each other. The church holds a crowd of strangers who share a space but no words, and the haircut is a one-to-one exchange where the speaker actually speaks. Both situations also involve a kind of surrender. In church the face lifts, and in the chair the head bows and the hair falls. The poem does not say which is more meaningful, or whether the speaker's talk about mining is a way of staying earthbound after the pull of the church. Judging by the details, the mining subject may point to a landscape where this history matters, but the poem never says so.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves out without feeling empty. In just over a dozen words per scene, it gives one image of reaching upward and one of digging into the past. It trusts a single raised face, a cold-weather haircut, and the title's two small directions to make a reader wonder what we look for above us, and what we keep returning to below.