Six short lines, no punctuation, not one capital letter, and in that space a day lifts off like a bird while a house, or a life, falls to pieces. Dave Bonta's "Inklings" is made of fragments, and the gaps between them carry much of its meaning. Nothing outside the six lines is needed to read it.
The first couplet sets two times side by side: "morning like a wing / tomorrow a fallen-down house." The words even sound alike, yet they point in opposite directions. Morning gets a simile, so it is only *like* a wing, light and full of lift. Tomorrow loses the "like" altogether. It doesn't resemble a ruin, it simply is one. The grammar hardens as it moves from the hopeful comparison to flat fact, and the missing verbs leave both statements hanging in the air. The hyphenated "fallen-down" also does its own work, tumbling three syllables into a single heavy word before the line lands on "house."
The second couplet moves from image to workshop: "not quite finished / making use of bad mortar." Mortar belongs to the house, so the collapse promised a line earlier now has a cause built in. The grammar is just as interesting, because nobody is named. Who is "not quite finished," and who is "making use"? It could be the speaker, the house, or the poem itself. "Finished" slides between "completed" and "done for," so the line can read as a builder's modest admission or as a quiet remark about being not quite at the end of life. Either way, the poem suggests making something out of flawed material, which is a fair description of building a life or writing a poem. The sounds help too. "Morning," "tomorrow" and "mortar" all share a *mor* syllable, which sits close to "mortal," though that word never appears.
Then comes the pivot, "but no god this day / brought me a black coach." The diction turns older and more solemn. "This day" has the ring of a prayer, as in "give us this day." A black coach, in this setting, most naturally suggests a hearse or a carriage of death, though it could also be the kind of grand vehicle a fairy tale delivers to a chosen passenger. The poem leaves the choice open. What it states is an absence: no god sent it. The line can be read as relief, since death hasn't come today. It can also be read as a bleaker note, since no rescue or summons has come either. The poem never says which, and that uncertainty is its heart.
The sound of the ending is worth hearing. The final stanza and the one before it are full of hard *b*'s: "bad," "but," "brought," "black." They link the flawed material to the final carriage, as if the same stubborn, clunking sound ran through both. The poem ends on two stressed monosyllables, "black coach," with no full stop to soften the landing.
There is no rhyme, and the lines vary in length, from the eight syllables of "tomorrow a fallen-down house" to the four of "not quite finished." That uneven rhythm lurches forward and stops short, which suits a poem about incompleteness. The title fits as well. An inkling is a faint hint rather than a certainty, and the word contains "ink," quietly tying the idea of hunches to the act of writing, and perhaps to the blackness of that last coach (a suggestion the poem makes by sound rather than statement).
What makes "Inklings" worth reading is how much it trusts the reader. By leaving out subjects, verbs and punctuation, it makes us supply the connections ourselves: morning to tomorrow, mortar to house, the missing god to the arriving or non-arriving coach. In a sense we become the builders, joining the pieces with whatever mortar we have. The poem doesn't announce that life is short and fragile. It offers a few small, strange images and lets that thought arrive on its own, which is exactly how an inkling works.