Twenty-six words, no comma, no full stop, and a title that sounds like an item on a clerk's inventory. "Improbabilities" is a dry, many-syllabled word, yet Dave Bonta puts it over a poem that does the opposite of what the title promises. It doesn't gasp or announce. The speaker reports marvels the way you might mention that you saw a heron on the way to work.
The central idea, as I read it, is that the improbable lives inside the ordinary, and that ordinary life is much stranger than we usually let ourselves notice. Each couplet gives an example, and each moves a step closer to something you could do tonight. The first is time itself: "I have seen yesterday come today." The grammar is slippery on purpose. It might mean the past has turned up again in the present, or only that one day has handed itself on to the next, which is a quiet marvel if you stare at it long enough. The verb that matters is "seen." The speaker claims eyewitness status, as though time were a visitor who walked into the room. Then "among other signs" turns these events into omens, and the casual "other" suggests there are plenty more where they came from.
The second couplet holds the poem's most charged image: "making bread / and wine out of words." The line break is doing real work here. "Making bread" stands alone for a moment as an honest, floury, domestic act. Only when the next line arrives does "out of words" reach back and claim the bread as well. Bread and wine together can hardly avoid sounding sacramental, and the poem seems to hint at words becoming substance, something like communion, without ever saying so. It is also a quietly self-referential claim. The poem is made of nothing but words, and it is trying to feed us. Whether it succeeds is left to the reader to taste.
The third couplet, "or meeting my love in a maze / after supper," is the most tender. A maze is built to lose people in, so finding someone there is a long shot. Yet "after supper" drops the scene into the most unmagical hour of the day, when the plates are cleared and an evening walk might begin. The maze could be a hedge garden, a dream, or the tangle of a long relationship. The poem doesn't say, and the openness seems intended. Love comes last because it is both the most relied upon and the least explicable, two people finding each other among all those turnings.
There is no rhyme, but sound holds the poem together anyway. The soft hiss of "seen," "signs" and "supper" bookends it, while "making," "meeting," "my" and "maze" give the final stretch a murmuring m-sound. "Wine" and "words" share their opening, which fits the idea that one might be turned into the other. Even "yesterday" and "today" echo each other, the same ending on different beginnings, so the pair acts out the poem's claim that one day can become another.
The line lengths work like a speaker's breathing. Long lines of eight or nine syllables state the wonder, and shorter ones of four or five trail after like a shrug: "among other signs," "after supper." The poem also moves through a day, from yesterday and today to the evening meal, and through a table, from the sacramental bread and wine to plain supper. It ends on one of its smallest, plainest phrases. With no final punctuation it stops mid-air, which matches "among other signs," because the list could clearly go on. The linking words, "like" and "or," are loose and conversational, as if the examples could be shuffled or added to.
The poem is worth reading because it trusts understatement. It gives no explanation and no big emotional close, and the marvel comes from the speaker's calm. In so few words it also shows how much a line break, a plain verb and a well-placed meal can do, and it suggests that wonder doesn't need a grand setting. Sometimes it only needs someone willing to say, "I have seen."