Dinner and a play is the most familiar script in dating, and Dave Bonta's six-line poem begins by promising to follow it: "I owe her dinner / and a play." The verb is the first surprise. Nobody owes a date the way they owe rent, yet the speaker treats courtship as a debt, half-guilty and half-playful, an IOU he is glad to honour. A few lines later the tidy arrangement slips out of his hands, and the poem becomes a miniature comedy of nervous generosity.
Its central idea seems to be that the real offering on a date is neither the meal nor the entertainment. It is the person, with all his small verbal flourishes and his hope that the other will put up with them. The poem never says this outright. It lets the grammar do the confessing.
That grammar is deliberately unsettled. There is no punctuation anywhere and no capital letters, so the lines run on without telling us where one thought ends. After "and a play," the phrase "the many little / witty expressions" can be read as a third thing owed, as if wit were another item on the bill alongside the dinner and the theatre tickets. It also reads as the start of a new thought. The line break after "little" gives that word a moment to stand alone, and it sounds faintly self-mocking before "witty expressions" completes the phrase. Here is a man who knows his clever remarks are small things and is bringing them anyway.
The word "play" also does double duty. A play is something you watch, but play is also what the "witty expressions" are. The speaker owes her theatre, and he may also be offering his own light performance.
Then comes the most tangled line: "that call to her bear." Several readings are possible. "Bear" can be the verb in "bear with," a plea for patience, so the sentence ends as a humble request: put up with me, and with a dish of myself. It can also mean "carry," so that the witty expressions arrive bearing something. And "her bear," read as a noun, brings a creature into the poem, a large animal lured by calling and by a dish of food. The poem doesn't choose between these. The image of a bear drawn toward a bowl is comic, a little undignified, and oddly tender, and it fits a speaker who is both eager and aware of how he must look.
The last line settles the bargain: "with a dish of myself." Food language has been running through the poem since "dinner," and now the speaker puts himself on the menu. "Dish" has an older, cheekier meaning too, since calling someone "quite a dish" means finding them attractive, so the phrase can be read as bashful flirtation. Either way, the dinner he owes becomes a dinner he *is*. The course that matters most is the one he serves from his own plate.
The shape of the poem supports this. The lines are short, mostly five syllables with about two strong beats each, and nothing rhymes. The poem does echo quietly in its sounds: the short *i* of "dinner," "little," "witty," "expressions" and "dish" gives the middle of the poem a skittish, clipped quality, like quick talk across a table. The final line is the longest, six syllables, and it ends on "myself," the heaviest word in the poem. The poem begins on "I" and ends on "myself," with "her" appearing twice in between, so the movement is from owing to giving, with the other person always at the centre.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In six lines it gives us a speaker with a sense of humour about his own charm, an old ritual made slightly strange, and a gentle joke about how much of courtship is self-presentation. Leaving out punctuation turns one sentence into several possibilities, so we hear the speaker's uncertainty as well as his words. A reader finishes it smiling, and probably also remembering how it feels to hope that someone will take you as you come.