A job advertisement usually promises something: a salary, a title, a future. Dave Bonta's "Job description" offers dirty boots and aches. In three unpunctuated tercets, it sketches the person who would take on a strange kind of work, and the poem seems to be about attention itself, about what it costs to be a witness or a carrier of news. Its central idea is that this work needs humility and presence more than status or skill.
The first stanza has no verb at all, only a stack of noun phrases, the way a real job posting fragments its requirements. "Night messenger" is an old-fashioned figure, someone who works while others sleep and carries what matters from one place to another. Then the detail turns homely: "boots all dirty," with a slightly childlike "all." The best twist is "aches fit for service." We expect "fit for service" to describe a healthy body, and here the aches themselves are the qualification. Wear and tiredness count as credentials, and the work has already marked this person's body.
The second stanza lifts the poem from the road to the horizon. A surveyor measures land so that it can be divided and owned, yet this one surveys the sea, which can't be fenced or staked. The job is paradoxical, perhaps impossible, and the poem seems to know it. Here the plural "we" appears for the first and only time: the sea is something "we desire more / than the king's own spring." The line break after "more" lets the desire hang for a beat before the comparison arrives. "Spring" is pleasantly ambiguous. It could be a source of water or the season, and either way it belongs to a king, something guarded and granted. The sea belongs to nobody, and the poem says that is what people long for. The words "king's" and "spring" also chime against each other, so the royal image has a small music of its own.
Only in the last stanza do verbs arrive, and they are the same verb three times: "must be a fly / must be a mind / must be present." The requirements finally sound like requirements, but none is a skill. They are ways of being. The fly is the humblest creature imaginable, unwelcome and low, yet it lands on everything and sees the world through eyes made of many lenses. The phrase also recalls the idea of a "fly on the wall," the unnoticed observer. Next comes "a mind," a leap from insect to thought, from watching to understanding. The last requirement, "present," is the plainest and the most layered. It can mean attending, being in the now, or even a gift. Judging by the progression, being there is harder than being clever.
The sound of the poem supports this. Nothing rhymes, and there is no punctuation, which keeps the list open, as though more requirements might follow. The vocabulary is almost entirely short, ordinary words. The lines are irregular at first, running from four to six syllables ("night messenger," "and aches fit for service"), but the final stanza settles into three lines of exactly four syllables. The anaphora of "must be" beats like a stamp or a rule. After the loose, wandering lines of the earlier stanzas, the poem tightens into a command at the moment it says what the job truly requires.
The imagery follows a similar path. We begin at ground level with boots and tired limbs, move out to the vast sea, then shrink to a fly and a mind. The poem never says who the worker is. The title invites us to think of a poet, but the text leaves the position open, and the single "we" draws the reader into the longing the job serves.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with a bureaucratic genre. It borrows the cold form of a hiring notice and uses it for something close to a quiet manifesto, in which the ideal employee is tired, low to the ground, and fully there. It ends on "present," and the poem itself seems to ask the reader for exactly that.