A diplomat lives by his voice, so it matters that the speaker of Dave Bonta's "Aging diplomat" starts by losing it: "hoarseness and war come to me." The two arrive side by side, as if one caused the other. When the person whose job is talking can no longer talk, conflict seems to walk in unopposed. The rest of the poem is an old negotiator's self-diagnosis, rueful and a little mocking, ending in a plea for help that has nowhere obvious to come from.
The central idea is that aging corrodes the very quality a career was built on. "I used to be open / to make any peace / to make peace with anybody," the speaker says, and the repetition does the work of boasting. The second line is a bigger claim than the first, moving from "any peace" to "anybody." Against that earlier flexibility, the present looks stiff. The speaker is no longer a go-between but something seized up, and the poem keeps this from becoming simple self-pity by letting the speaker see himself with a certain dry humor: "it seems almost romantic / to force a leaden discourse." The word "almost" is where the irony sits. Grinding out heavy, joyless talk could look noble, even picturesque, from a distance, but the speaker knows what it feels like.
The poem's imagery is metallic. Rust and lead are both dull, heavy, and unlovely, and neither is a metal you would associate with persuasion. The line "I become great with rust" is the most interesting in the poem because "great" pulls two ways. It can mean grand and distinguished, the rank of a veteran statesman. But "great with" also echoes the old idiom for pregnancy, "great with child," so the speaker is swelling with decay as though it were something he was carrying. Honor and ruin become the same thing. "Leaden" then adds weight to speech itself, and it is hard not to hear a faint trace of bullets in it, which suits a poem that has already let "war" in.
Formally, Bonta keeps everything spare. There are five unrhymed couplets, no punctuation, and no capital letters except the pronoun "I." That bareness makes the speech feel like a murmured private thought, but the syntax still plays tricks. The sentence "I become great with rust / as I used to be open" runs across the stanza break into "to make any peace," so openness and peacemaking stay linked even as the break holds them apart. Sound does quiet work too: the r of "rust" returns in "romantic" and "restore," so the poem's corrosion and its longing share a consonant. "Hoarseness" and "war" echo each other as well, as if the voice and the violence were made from the same raw material. The grammar of "I have been strange" is odd. A reader expects "a stranger," but "strange" describes a condition, not a role. For a diplomat, who is by definition a professional foreigner, it can mean both estranged and simply unlike himself.
The ending is the poem's biggest turn. Until now the speaker has only observed, but the last couplet suddenly cries out: "o carcass come mediate / restore simplicity." The "o" is the only exclamation in the poem, and it is aimed at his own body, now reduced to a "carcass." The speaker, who once mediated between nations, is asking his worn-out body to mediate for him. The commands are bare, with no "please" and no "and," the plain syntax of someone who has run out of ornament. "Simplicity" is a striking final request. After a career in which making peace meant being all things to anyone, what the speaker wants is something unadorned, and the poem itself, with its short lines and plain words, tries to deliver it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in ten brief lines. It does not name a specific war, country, or treaty, so the diplomat can stand for anyone whose talent has become a habit and then a burden. It also refuses to be solemn: the rust is grand and ridiculous, the romance only "almost" real, and the final address to the body is both tender and a little grim. The poem is about growing old, and it also asks what remains of a skill once the person who owned it has worn down.