Nobody in Dave Bonta's "Listener" seems to be listening to the speaker, and that is where the poem starts. He wanders "up and down town / thinking about drinking," and the world, he says, "offered little / but contrary ears." "Contrary" is a slightly comic word to hang on an ear. These are ears that argue back, that hear only in order to disagree. What the speaker does next is the poem's quiet turn. Unheard himself, he becomes the one who hears, and the remaining eight lines are a short catalogue of what he takes in.
The construction is spare. There are ten lines in five couplets, no punctuation apart from an apostrophe and a hyphen, and a lowercase start, so the poem reads like a thought that has been going on before we arrived. The only real rhyme comes at the very beginning, in "thinking" and "drinking." It gives the opening a loose, slightly woozy jingle, like a tune hummed on a walk, and "up and down town" has the pacing beat of feet on pavement. After that the rhyme disappears, as if the fog were lifting. Line lengths vary from three syllables to eight, and the poem often lets a longer line run and then clips the next one short. "I love the industrious sand" is followed by the abrupt "of men's thoughts," which lands like a dropped pebble.
That second image is the strangest in the poem. Sand is not usually industrious, but the adjective makes it a worker, and the phrase suggests thoughts as countless tiny grains, endlessly shifting and piling up. Judging by the imagery, there may be a hint of time running through them, the way sand runs through an hourglass, though the poem leaves that unsaid. What matters is the verb. After the world's refusal to listen, the speaker says "I love," and the feeling is tender rather than bitter. He cannot get a hearing, yet he still loves what people think.
The last two couplets turn from the crowd to two extreme figures, the eunuch and the martyrs. The eunuch sings, and what the speaker hears is "such a never-imagined ache." The hyphenated compound stretches the line and slows it down, as though the speaker were straining to find a word for a pain he could not have invented for himself. Then come the martyrs. The word comes from a Greek word for "witness," and in a poem titled "Listener" that seems to matter. Witnesses and listeners are close relatives. The martyrs "make me open / volumes of shame," and "volumes" works two ways. It means books, and it also means loudness, as if the shame were something turned up until it can't be ignored. "Open" works two ways as well, since a person can open a book and can also open himself. The long "a" in "make," "ache" and "shame" ties these final couplets together, so the sound seems to press the three ideas into one.
Watch the verbs and you can follow the poem's whole movement: "thinking," "offered," "love," "hear," "make me open." The speaker begins as a self-absorbed walker, circling the same streets with thoughts of drink. By the end he is receptive, even acted upon, since the martyrs "make" him open the books. The poem never says that listening replaces drinking, but the shape invites that reading. A thirst for escape gives way to taking in other people's voices, though what he takes in is not comforting.
That refusal of comfort is what gives the poem its weight. It would be easy to write about listening as a gentle virtue. Here it is costly. To hear the song of the eunuch or the witness of the martyrs is to feel implicated, and the poem ends on "shame" rather than consolation. It does not say whose shame it is, the speaker's own or humanity's, and that open question is worth discussing in class. In ten unpunctuated lines it suggests that when nobody will listen to us, the best answer may be to listen to others, however much it hurts.