Eight lines, and only one of them contains a verb: "you come this morning." Everything else in Dave Bonta's "Remains of the daydream" is arrival, description or possession. That lopsidedness is the poem's argument in miniature. Something moves, and the speaker, by the end, can only stand there holding what he has.
The "you" is deliberately unfixed. The title suggests a daydream, so the visitor may be a person, a memory, or desire itself, and the poem never settles which. Judging by the title, "remains" can be read two ways: what is left over after the daydream ends, and what stays stubbornly present. The first stanza places the visitor in "blue fields" and "backward months." Blue suggests distance and haze, the colour of places that exist more in imagination than on a map. "Backward months" bends time, as if the calendar had been run in reverse. That prepares for the second stanza's "unseasonable sex," a phrase that is out of season in the literal sense of the word. Desire turns up at the wrong time of year, or the wrong time of life, and seems all the more vivid for it.
The strangest image is the simile: "like an ear on a birch." Readers can supply different pictures, perhaps a curl of bark, a catkin, or a growth on the trunk, but the poem declines to say. What the image does give is a sense of attention. An ear listens, so the tree seems to be eavesdropping on the arrival, and sex becomes something physical and watched by the natural world rather than abstract. Then comes "barbarously aflutter." "Barbarously" is a harsh, outsider's word, from the vocabulary of invasions and gates, yet it modifies something as light as fluttering. The mix of violence and delicacy captures how a sudden surge of feeling can seem both savage and trembling.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short enough to feel like breaths. But the middle stanza is stretched by long, Latinate words, "unseasonable" and "barbarously," which sprawl across their lines. The b sounds that run through the poem ("blue," "backward," "birch," "barbarously") give it a soft, percussive pulse, as though something were knocking. Then the last stanza snaps back to plain, mostly one-syllable words: "and me with my fence." The speaker's world is smaller and flatter in sound as well as in meaning.
That final stanza turns the poem. The fence is the obvious opposite of the open "fields." It marks a boundary, a way of keeping the wild outside, and "my" appears twice, which makes the speaker sound proprietary and a little defensive. The syntax matters too. "And me" arrives like an afterthought, grammatically stranded without a verb, while the visitor gets the only action in the poem. The speaker is not doing anything. He is simply there with his property.
The most interesting phrase is "embers of order." Embers are what remain of a fire, which echoes the title's "remains." They suggest order is already mostly burnt out, a leftover glow rather than a strong structure. Yet embers are also the one thing in the poem that can be fanned back to life. The poem never says whether the speaker will guard them or let the daydream blow across them, and that unresolved tension keeps it alive. Fire quietly links order to desire as well, since both are forms of heat.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so few words without explaining itself. There is no punctuation to tell us how to feel, no confession, and no resolution. It catches the moment when imagination or longing intrudes on a tidy, defended life, and it respects that moment enough to leave it open. The speaker is not a hero or a fool, just someone standing at his fence in the morning, aware of how little is holding the wildness back.