A banquet is usually something you do with your mouth, so it is a small shock when Dave Bonta gives one to hands. "The first time we touch / is a banquet for hands" borrows the vocabulary of taste and abundance for the sense of touch, which the title, "Tactile," has already put at the centre. The idea is that a first touch is not a single sensation but a spread of them, almost too much to take in. Hands, usually the tools we use without thinking, become guests who are suddenly hungry and overwhelmed by choice.
The poem never says who "we" are. Judging by the phrase "the first time we touch," it suggests lovers, but the poem gives us no more than that, and the vagueness is useful. The reader is not told a story, only handed a moment and left to stand inside it.
The middle stanza is the strangest and the richest. "Within an egg / the light is beautiful / as a bruise." The line break lets "within an egg" hang for a second before the sentence continues, so we aren't sure whether the light is inside an egg or the two people are. Either way, an egg suggests something closed, fragile and not yet finished: a small private world with a thin shell around it. The light that filters through is soft and dim, which prepares the simile. A bruise is a mark left by touch, and it is also a surprising kind of beauty, with its purples, yellows and greens. By comparing the light to a bruise, the poem admits that closeness carries a risk of hurt. The same contact that feeds the hands can also mark them. Nothing is spelled out, but the image makes tenderness and injury sit side by side.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short and unpunctuated, with no capital letters anywhere. That lowercase hush makes the poem feel quiet, almost whispered. Yet the language has its own music. The "b" sounds of "banquet," "beautiful" and "bruise" link the feast to the wound, as if the poem were quietly saying they belong to the same experience. The first line also has a gentle, falling rhythm, and "banquet for hands" lands on the long, open "hands" like a plate set down. The middle stanza is a tercet, set between two couplets, and the odd shape suits the egg: a rounded, slightly swollen centre between two tighter pairs of lines.
Then the tone shifts. "And we could go play / at another door." After the heavy, glowing image of the bruise, the diction turns light and almost childlike. "Play" is a sudden, unexpected verb, and "could" matters too, since it offers a possibility rather than a plan. The opening "and" makes the line sound like a casual afterthought, as if the speaker is easing the tension by suggesting a game. A door is a threshold, so this "another door" may mean another way out of the egg, or another kind of encounter beyond this one. The poem does not decide. It might be a gesture of relief, or a hint of restlessness, or simply an invitation to keep exploring. I read it as a lightening: having named how intense and fragile the moment is, the speaker steps back from it without denying it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into seven short lines. It moves from appetite to enclosure to release, and from the body to a picture of light to an open question, with no explanation in between. It also trusts its images to do the work. The banquet, the egg and the bruise are not decorations. Each one lets us feel a different side of the same first touch: its abundance, its shelter and its tenderness. The last couplet's refusal to settle leaves us at a doorway, which is where a first touch tends to leave people anyway.