A mole, a stone, a handful of oysters: Dave Bonta's "Discursed" gives us three small pictures in six short lines and leaves the reader to work out how they connect. The title is the first puzzle. "Discursed" is not an everyday word. It looks like a stretched-out form of "discoursed," and tucked inside it, almost audibly, is the word "cursed." Whether or not Bonta intended the pun, it colours everything that follows. Talk, argument and theory, the whole business of "discourse," start to sound like something done *to* the speaker rather than something he does.
The opening couplet sets this up with a comic image. "A mole managing a stone" is a creature built for loose soil, nearly blind, shoving at an obstacle far too hard for it. "Managing" is the funniest word here. It sounds like office work, as though the mole were coping with a difficult task by sheer dogged administration. The repeated *m* sounds in "mole managing" make the line itself feel like a muffled effort. Then comes "my life under discourse," and the mole turns out to be a self-portrait. "Under" works literally, since moles live underground, and figuratively, since being "under discourse" suggests being buried beneath other people's talk, or placed under examination. The poem never says "is" or "like." It simply sets the two lines side by side and trusts us to feel the equation.
The second couplet is the shortest and the bleakest. "Poor and broken / are my books" turns the sentence around so that the damage arrives before the thing damaged. It sounds old-fashioned, almost like a confession. "Broken" is pleasingly ambiguous: it might mean cracked spines and worn-out pages, or books that have failed to deliver the authority they promised. Either way, the speaker's one possession is in bad shape. At only seven syllables in total, this stanza is the poem at its most clamped shut.
That clamped feeling is why the last couplet lands so well. "Nothing but oysters" seems to continue the put-down, as if books were mere scraps. But oysters are not nothing. They are a treat, and a hard-won one. They have to be pried open, and what you get is a mouthful of something living and salty. Here the poem quietly changes direction. A shell is a kind of small stone, so the mole's struggle returns in miniature, but this time the effort pays off. The long *o* sounds in "poor," "broken," "oysters" and "opened" ripple through the final lines. The closing line, "opened for a late supper," is also the longest in the poem, so the verse itself seems to open out after the tight stanza before it. "Late" may hint at the end of a day or, judging by the imagery, a later stage of life. "Supper" suggests a modest, private meal rather than a feast.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its lines are short and uneven, and its connections come from sound and image rather than from pattern. That fits its subject, because nothing about this intellectual life is smooth or elegant. The quiet joke is that "discourse" is a lofty, lecture-hall word, and Bonta drags it down into dirt and shellfish.
That is where the poem's central idea sits. Reading and thinking are presented as physical labour: blind, awkward, done in the dark, with no guarantee of reward. The speaker is self-mocking but not despairing. The books may be "poor and broken," yet they are still opened, and still nourish. In about twenty words the poem argues that knowledge is something you pry out rather than are handed, and that the effort, comic as it looks, is worth making. Its significance lies in that economy. A few concrete images do the work of a long essay on what it feels like to live among books and arguments, and the final image offers a small, salty reward for the struggle.