Ask what a tree's music is for, and Dave Bonta's answer is startlingly plain: it is for going. "All the music of a tree / is to make it go." We usually think of music as an extra, something added to life once the practical business is done. The poem turns that around. For a tree, it suggests, the sound and the living are one thing, and the music is simply what keeping going looks and sounds like.
The first stanza gets its force from plainness. Apart from "music," every word is a single syllable, and the phrase "make it go" sounds more like talk about an engine than a line of lyric poetry. The verb is deliberately open. Go where? Grow, sway, last through another season? The poem never says. The going is the point, not any destination. The opening "all" works two ways, too. It means the whole of the music, and it also says that this is all there is: nothing decorative, nothing left over.
The second stanza names what the music is not. "More than art or play" rules out the two things people do when they are free of necessity, making beautiful objects and amusing themselves. Then comes the surprise of "a festival of use." Festivals are about excess and celebration, while "use" suggests tools and chores. Putting them side by side makes the poem's real claim: usefulness, fully lived, is already a celebration. There is a quiet sound-link here as well. The "yoo" of "use" is already inside "music," so the two words seem to have been related all along.
The final stanza is where the poem opens up. "A faith that we hear / as singing" brings in a listener, and with it a doubt. The tree does not sing. We hear the singing, and it is we who turn the work of living into song. "Faith" is a risky word to place beside "use." It suggests trust without proof, a tree putting out growth every year with no guarantee. It may also suggest our own faith, the belief that what we hear in wind and leaves means something. The poem leaves both readings possible.
The stanza's shape matters too. It is the longest, yet its lines shrink to single words: "singing / being / beyond." The reader slows down, and the words seem to rise with each break. "Singing" and "being" share the ongoing "-ing" ending, the same sense of continuing action that "go" had in the first stanza. "Being" and "beyond" share their first syllable, so the last two lines feel like one thought stretching outward. The grammar is slippery as well. The three words can be a list, or they can run together as "we hear as singing being beyond." Neither reading cancels the other.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The stanzas run two lines, two lines, then four, and the rhythm is that of someone speaking slowly and carefully. The poem has no punctuation and no capital letters. Nothing marks a beginning or an end, and it stops on "beyond" without a full stop. A poem about something that keeps going could hardly end more fittingly than by declining to close.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it argues in so little space. It refuses the old division between the useful and the beautiful, and it does so without lecturing, using small words and one startling pairing, "festival" and "use." It also changes how we listen. After reading it, the creak and rustle of a tree sound less like entertainment for us and more like effort and celebration at once, with our own hearing as the final turn. A reader may also wonder whether the same is true of people, and whether our own art is really "more than" the living it comes out of.