Six couplets, six small announcements, and not one of them explains itself. Dave Bonta's "Ghazal" borrows the name of a form with long roots in Arabic, Persian and Urdu poetry, then plays with it. The skeleton stays and the rest is free to wander.
In a traditional ghazal, each couplet stands alone, and a refrain returns at the end of the second line. Bonta keeps both features. His refrain is not a poetic word, though. It is a verb of reporting: "they said," "I said." The two alternate through the poem, so the first, third and fifth couplets end with "they said" and the second, fourth and sixth with "I said." There is no real rhyme. The flat, repeated "said" does the work of a closing beat, the way a drummer might tap the same note after every phrase. It makes the poem sound like talk, something half-heard in a car or over a fence.
That alternation turns out to be the poem's quiet subject: how news reaches us. The "they said" couplets feel like things passed along to the speaker: a boy who speaks in a whisper, a bear in the driveway, a forest of tiny trees. The bear couplet stings a little, since it happened "while you were picking berries behind the house." Something large and dangerous came close, and the person it concerned missed it. The "I said" couplets lean toward what the speaker has seen or decided for himself. Judging by the pattern, the poem sets rumor against witness and refuses to rank them.
The images hold together more than the leaps suggest. Smallness and fragility keep surfacing. The boy with hemophilia, a condition that makes bleeding dangerous, speaks softly, and the whisper reads as a kind of carefulness. The "ancient forest" has trees "six inches tall," which turns age and size upside down. The best image is the tanager, oriole and goldfinch, "all males, / in a single tree at dusk: three flames." The metaphor is quick and exact. Bright birds against darkening air become small fires, and the word "flames" is the most vivid thing in a poem that otherwise keeps its voice level.
The traffic cop couplet supplies the comedy. A person whose job is to direct people becomes the reason they stop and ask for directions. Authority is undone by attraction, and the joke is delivered with a perfectly straight face, as if the speaker were offering a reasonable explanation.
The last couplet changes the weight. It has the longest line in the poem, and it ends on its heaviest phrase: "the Shadow of Death." The context is mundane: "on the way home from D.C.," a stop to read "a historical marker." Readers who know Psalm 23 will hear its "valley of the shadow of death" in the phrase. That is an inference, since the poem never says so. What the poem does show is death handled casually, as a roadside stop. And the closing "I said" lands where a ghazal poet would traditionally sign off, so the speaker's voice stands in for a signature.
Read back from that ending, a darker thread appears. Bleeding, a bear, fire, a shadow: the poem is more attentive to mortality than its chatty tone admits. Wonder and danger arrive in the same deadpan voice, and the poem never tells us which to feel. A tiny ancient forest and a bear in the driveway get the same treatment.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth studying. The gaps between couplets are not a flaw. They are where the reader does the work, hunting for links between a whisper, a cop, a bear, three birds, a stunted forest and a marker. The ghazal form, built on disconnection, suits a world that comes to us in fragments, and Bonta shows that a handful of overheard and observed scraps can still add up to a view of life: fragile, funny, bright at dusk, and always close to a shadow.