Dave Bonta's "Luciferase" keeps its key in the title. Luciferase is the name for enzymes that let living things make light, and the word grows from "Lucifer," Latin for "light-bringer," which is also a name for the fallen angel. So before the first line we already have a laboratory term and a hint of damnation. The poem itself never uses the words "light" or "glow." It relies on one image, foxfire, the faint, cold shine given off by rotting wood when certain fungi feed on it.
That image carries the central idea: "the self as foxfire / in a corpse." Foxfire is not a flame and does not warm anything. It exists only because something is breaking down. If the self is like this, then consciousness is not a spirit visiting the body but a pale by-product of the body's slow undoing. The choice of "corpse" over "log" makes the comparison personal. The article matters too. Bonta writes "the self," not "my self," a flat, almost clinical phrase that sets the speaker at a distance from his own identity, as if he were examining a specimen.
The second stanza starts to move. "Nightwalking" is a single compound word, which makes the walking sound like a habit or a condition rather than a one-off stroll. The poem has no finite verb at all, so we never learn who is walking. The nearest candidate is the foxfire-self, and the picture that forms is a dim, drifting glow among broken walls. "Ruins" echoes "corpse" on a larger scale: the body is a ruin, and the ruin is a body. Foxfire is only visible in darkness, so the night setting is not decoration. It is the one condition under which this kind of light can be seen.
The last stanza turns oddly gentle. "Toward a weary / day's pleasure" breaks after "weary," so the adjective hangs at the end of its line like a tired sigh. The grammar is slippery. Is the day weary, or the pleasure, or the walker? The possessive "day's" suggests the pleasure belongs to the day rather than to the self, which fits a poem that has already treated the self as borrowed light. There is also a tension we can only offer as a reading: foxfire fades in daylight, so the glowing walker seems to be heading toward the very thing that will make it invisible. Yet the word is "pleasure," not "dread." The tone is modest and unglamorous. After all this talk of corpses and ruins, what waits at the end is something small, tired and perhaps enough.
The form works the same way. Three two-line stanzas, no rhyme, no punctuation, no capital letters. The lines are very short, and the white space around them does for the page what darkness does for foxfire. Without commas or full stops the poem never settles into a firm statement, which suits its uncertainty about where the self begins and ends. It has the compression of a haiku without following a strict syllable count. The sound is hushed: "self," "corpse," "ruins" and "day's" leave soft sibilants lingering, and "foxfire" doubles its *f* sound as if the word itself were flickering.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a technical word, luciferase, and uses it to question what a "self" is. It manages this without lecturing and without melodrama. Many poems about death reach for grand symbols such as the sun, the sea or the soul. Bonta picks something humble and slightly eerie, a glow in rotten wood, and lets it carry the argument. The result is both unsettling and consoling. We are told that our brightness depends on decay, and then, in the final lines, that the walk goes on toward some ordinary, weary pleasure. The poem leaves it to the reader to decide whether that ending is acceptance or irony, and the question is still there once the poem is over.