We say we are "beside ourselves" with grief or joy and rarely picture it. Dave Bonta pictures it, and takes the phrase literally. In six unpunctuated lines, his speaker stands outside his own body at its burial, a guest at his own funeral. Then, to our surprise, he offers a review.
The opening couplet sets up a puzzle. "you carried me to the burial / of my still corpse." If the corpse is "mine," who is the "me" being carried? It must be the self that keeps watching, light enough, or ghostly enough, to be lifted and taken along. The poem never says who "you" is. It could be a lover, a friend, or the reader, but the verb is physical and tender, the way one carries a child or someone too tired to walk. The word "still" does double work. It means motionless, but it also means "even now," as if the speaker's attention refuses to stop. Judging by the vocabulary that follows, "still" may even hint at a still life, the painter's name for arranged, unmoving objects. The corpse is being looked at the way a picture is.
The second couplet makes that look explicit, and it is where the poem turns funny. "which I think one / of the best I ever saw." The relative pronoun "which" could point back to the corpse or to the burial, and both readings are absurd in a pleasing way. The speaker sounds like someone ranking restaurants or sunsets, hedging politely with "I think." The phrase "ever saw" implies a lifetime of attending funerals, so he is a seasoned witness, even a connoisseur. The line break after "one" leaves the sentence briefly hanging, as if he were weighing the competition. This deadpan is also a defence. Calm, faintly comic language is a way of getting through something that would flatten anyone who looked at it head-on.
The final couplet shifts the register. "who loves as well / as the eyes." There is no question mark, so the line can be read as a question or as a flat claim. The most natural reading is that nobody loves as well as the eyes do. That would explain the earlier praise. The speaker's "best I ever saw" is not cold appraisal but a form of devotion, and looking at his own body with such attention is his last act of love. The phrase "as well" also quietly means "also," so another reading is that the eyes love in addition to seeing. And "eyes" is a near-homophone of "I's." That may be coincidence, but it fits a poem about a self split in two, one I lying still and another I watching. I offer that as a possibility, not a certainty.
The form is bare. There are three couplets, no rhyme and no punctuation, and every line begins in lowercase. Line lengths shrink and swell: a long first line is followed by a short one ("of my still corpse"), and the last couplet ends on the three-syllable "as the eyes," so the poem fades out on the organ of looking rather than on the grave. In "still corpse" two stressed words sit side by side and slow the voice down almost to a halt. Soft l-sounds in "still," "loves" and "well" carry a gentleness into a poem that begins with a burial. The second and third couplets both open with relative pronouns, "which" and "who," so each seems to continue the sentence before it. The grammar is slightly loose, which suits a mind drifting outside its own body.
The poem is significant because it does so much with so little. It turns a worn idiom into a scene, mixes dark comedy with real tenderness, and changes what death is allowed to be. Death here is not a horror to be shouted at but an occasion for attention. The speaker's last gift to himself is to see well, and the poem asks us whether that, finally, is what love is.