Superstition is a strange kind of faith: people knock on wood exactly when they doubt that knocking will help. Dave Bonta's "Disenchanted" starts with that half-joking gesture and uses it to ask a much bigger question. How can someone know they will die and still not quite believe it?
The first stanza, "touching wood / I believe and do not believe," sets the poem's pattern of two opposite states held at once. Ordinary logic would demand a choice, and the poem refuses. The title sharpens the tension. To be disenchanted is to have a spell broken, to lose the sense that the world is charmed. Yet the speaker is still performing a small ritual of enchantment. They are disenchanted and cannot quite stop reaching for the wood.
Then the poem lurches into something like a fairy tale or a dream: "the day I met a bear / the doors were open / and the road was gone." Nothing is explained. The poem never says whether this is memory, fable or nightmare, though the bear, a creature of folk tales, and the loose logic suggest the last two. Each detail takes away a kind of protection or direction. Open doors mean nothing is keeping anything out, or in, and a missing road means there is no route to follow. The lines are joined by a bare "and," not a "because," so the loss feels arbitrary. The bear may also echo the opening. Judging by the imagery, the "wood" that was touched for luck has become a place where something wild can be met.
The poem then returns to its opening statement with small but telling changes: "I believe but cannot believe / that I will die." "And do not" becomes "but cannot," and a choice turns into an incapacity. The first stanza never said what was being believed, and only now do we learn it. That delay makes the poem feel like someone circling a subject they can't look at directly. When it arrives, "that I will die" is stated flatly, with no punctuation and no drama.
What follows is almost a shrug: "to pass time I read history." The phrase "pass time" is quietly ironic, since time passes whether we help it or not. The reader may also hear a faint echo of "passing" in the other sense. History is a record of people who did die, so reading it could be a way of facing mortality or of avoiding it. The poem leaves both possibilities open.
The closing line, "so much is ours without us," is the most ambiguous. It can console: the past and the world we inherit belong to us even though we were not there for them. It can also chill: all of this will go on being called "ours" when there is no "us" left to own it. This line ties the poem together. History is the world without us in the past, and death is the world without us in the future. Reading about one may be a way of rehearsing the other.
The form suits this restraint. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and everything apart from the title is lowercase, so the voice sounds quiet and unemphatic. The stanzas shrink and swell, from two lines to three to one, and the white space between them works like pauses for thought. The sound patterns are subtle. "Believe," "bear" and "but" share an initial b, which gives the middle of the poem a faint thud. The long, slow vowels of "doors" and "road" stretch that stanza out. The last line is short and even, with the rhythm of a proverb, though what it says is anything but settled.
The poem matters because it is honest about a common experience that most writing about death smooths over: knowing something intellectually and being unable to feel it. It does not console, and it does not panic. It uses a handful of plain words, one odd encounter and a double-edged ending to make that gap visible, and then it stops and lets the reader stay in it.