A will is supposed to hand things over, and Dave Bonta's "Testament: last lines" begins by admitting it can't. The dedication, "for all those I have plundered," carries a bracketed confession, "nothing I have is mine to give away," which undercuts the whole genre before the poem starts. What follows is less a bequest than a confession. The speaker cannot read his own feelings and has taken more than he can repay from a world that keeps offering more. By the end he has no words left, only a bird's.
The opening is deliberately unlovely. His "stale devotion" is "made up entirely of curse words," so love sounds like swearing. Then comes a jolting image: "no condoms for the heart / will save you daily from three dozen blessings." Blessings are treated like an infection you might want protection from, and the comic precision of "three dozen" and the sudden "you" make it sound like a bleak joke told to a friend. The idea seems to be that gratitude cannot be avoided, since no safeguard works against being given too much. The next lines show what these blessings look like: "pale orange branches, pale blue sky." They are ordinary things, repeated in the doubled "pale." With no punctuation, "there are always more" can lean back on the blessings or forward into the next image, so abundance spills over the line break.
The middle of the poem turns strange and tactile. "The mother's slim hands vanishing into blurred velvet / her compound bird-span wings disguised as eyes / in twilight." Judging by the imagery, I read a moth here, with its velvety body, eye-like markings on the wings, and compound eyes, and "mother" sits one letter from "moth." Whether or not that pun was intended, the figure slides between human and insect, and the hardness of "curves as hard as nutshells" sets a brittle shell against the soft velvet. Then the view widens to "the bright flying splinters of the stars," which "shower onto the earth / to house its want." A splinter is a small wound, so the stars give light and hurt together. "House" is used as a verb, as if the earth's need were something to shelter rather than fill.
The poem then turns inward. "Elusive green whorl / and I hid it like a mutant twin." The green thing, perhaps new growth, is treated as a shameful double of the self, kept out of sight. It is "unraveling the dark seam of winter," and the sewing words "seam" and "unraveling" echo the earlier velvet, so the landscape becomes cloth coming apart at a "notch between hills." If the green is what undoes winter, then hiding it is the poem's real plunder: the speaker kept back a source of renewal. The poem never says so outright, and that restraint is part of its effect.
Formally, the poem is a single block of eighteen lines of free verse, with no rhyme and almost no end punctuation until the dash near the close. Lines of very different lengths, from "there are always more" to the long moth sentence, give it the uneven rhythm of a thought that keeps changing direction. Its music comes from small repetitions and clusters of sound: "pale" twice, the soft b and p of "branches" and "blurred," the hard consonants in "nutshells" and "splinters."
The ending pays off the beginning. The speaker opened unable to "decipher" his devotion, and he closes with "I am as empty as the mourning dove calling today – / whoo-ah-ooo-ooo-ah." The last line is a transcribed sound, not a sentence, and the round vowels make it feel hollow, like blowing across a bottle. "Mourning" brings in grief, and "today" fixes the testament in one particular moment. The emptiness here is both a lack and an openness, since a hollow thing can still carry a call.
The poem is significant because it takes a form built on ownership and turns it into an admission of dependence. It brings crude, bodily language into contact with delicate natural detail and lets neither win. Its answer to having nothing to give is to listen, and to end on the dove's call.