Six short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a title that promises a secret. In "Clandestine," Dave Bonta writes about a private grief, the sort a person hides even from the people around them. The speaker admits to "a tear or two" and then nearly shrugs the feeling off. What matters is where those tears go, and what is left behind when a woman, unnamed and unexplained, departs.
The poem is built from three couplets, each handling one stage of the feeling. The first is a plain statement: "my eyes hold / a tear or two." The verb "hold" is careful and a little stiff, as if the speaker is gripping something that might spill. "A tear or two" is a casual, understated phrase, the language of someone minimising. The shrug is the clue that the feeling is bigger than he admits, and that is how the poem keeps its grief clandestine.
The second couplet turns that restraint into a ritual: "which I sacrifice / to things out of sight." "Sacrifice" belongs to altars and offerings, so the tears become something given up for a cause. The recipients are never named. They might be memories, the absent woman, or feelings with no clear shape. The vagueness fits the title, since the speaker is making an offering to powers he cannot see. There is also a small irony here. Eyes are the organs of sight, yet they are spending their water on what lies "out of sight." The long *i* sound runs through the poem ("my eyes," "I," "sacrifice," "sight," "my"), and these repeated vowels link the speaker's body to what he cannot see.
The last couplet is the hardest to read, and the missing punctuation is the reason. "her parting with me / this clutter in my pen" has no verb. It can be read as an equation, where her leaving *is* the clutter in the pen. It can also be read as two separate losses set side by side, her departure and the mess it has made of his writing. The phrase "parting with me" is also interesting. We usually "part with" possessions, so the wording hints that she has given him up like something once owned, or that he feels discarded. That is an inference from the language, not a certainty, but it adds a sting to a quiet line.
"Clutter" is the most surprising word in the poem. Grief is usually described with words like emptiness or ache, but clutter suggests too much, a drawer or desk crammed with things. A cluttered pen suggests a mind so full of the parting that the words will not come out cleanly. The pen is also a container, like the eyes in line one. Eyes hold tears and the pen holds clutter, and both are fluids waiting to be released. The poem seems to say that the writer's real tears are the ink, and that writing is another way of crying in secret. Seen this way, the poem itself is the clandestine act, a hidden grief passed to the page.
The rhythm supports this. There is no rhyme, which keeps the voice conversational and unadorned. The lines slowly lengthen, from three syllables in "my eyes hold" to four in "a tear or two," five in "which I sacrifice," and six in the final line. The feeling gradually overflows its small container. Because there is no full stop, the poem does not close. It trails off at "pen," as though the writing is still going and the clutter is still being sorted.
What makes the poem significant is how little it needs. We never learn who "her" is, why she left, or what the speaker expects to lose next. Bonta gives us two pieces of body and equipment, the eyes and the pen, and trusts the reader to feel the weight between them. For a student, it shows how restraint can be more powerful than declaration. A speaker who says he has only "a tear or two" makes us suspect there are many more.