Dave Bonta's "How I Knew Her" keeps promising an explanation and then handing over a puzzle. Four times the speaker begins with the same formula, "I knew her the way...", and four times the comparison is stranger and less comforting than the last. The poem is about how little of another person we can actually know, and how that partial knowledge gets built from reflections, performances, failed gestures and gaps.
The first simile is the most beautiful and the most unsettling. A lake knows a mountain "from the top down", which is odd, because a lake sits at the mountain's foot. The phrase makes sense if we picture a reflection, where the summit is the deepest point in the water's image. The next line confirms it: "Through careful reassembly after every breeze." Each ripple shatters the mountain's image, and the water patiently puts it back together. Knowing someone, the poem suggests, is not a single act of understanding but a repeated repair job, and the knower is only ever holding an image on a surface, not the thing itself.
The second stanza turns comic. A clown knows boredom intimately, since the clown's whole job is to fight it. Then the syntax goes off balance: the speaker knew her "better than I knew that absurdity my self." Splitting "myself" into "my self" makes the speaker's identity into something held at arm's length, an object he is a little embarrassed by. Perhaps he is the clown. Either way, the claim to know her is wrapped in self-mockery, and the stanza is only two lines long, as if it cut itself short out of awkwardness.
The ear candle stanza is the funniest and, I think, the sharpest. An ear candle is a hollow candle burned in the ear, supposedly to clean it, so it is a gadget that promises care and fails to deliver. The speaker knew her "through the most intimate of failures", and the failure is intimate in a literal, physical sense. The line that follows, "& the sincerest form of flattery", borrows the old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Here it hints that the knowing was a kind of imitation, a performance of closeness that was meant to flatter and did not quite work. The ampersand adds a casual, offhand note, as though the speaker is too tired to write out "and".
By the end, the poem has moved from nature (lake, mountain) through two deflating human images (clown, ear candle) and back to nature. "I knew her the way the night knows lightning: / by inference from the series of missing moments." This is the poem's darkest turn. Lightning is what interrupts night, so night can only know it as a set of absences, moments when it was briefly not itself. The vocabulary changes to match. After the plain, mostly one-syllable comedy of the middle, "inference" and "series" sound like reasoning done at a distance. Judging by the past tense of "knew" and the stress on what is missing, the poem seems to look back on someone no longer fully present, though it never says so.
The structure supports this. There is no rhyme, and the free verse relies on repetition instead. The refrain "I knew her the way" works like a tuning fork, so each variation is heard against the last. The stanzas alternate between three lines and two, a small see-saw that mirrors the lurching between tenderness and joke. Each image also reverses the one before it in a quiet way: knowledge by reflection, by professional closeness, by failed contact, and finally by pure absence.
What makes the poem significant is how much it fits into so few lines without ever settling into a single mood. It is funny, but the humor is a way of admitting sadness. It is about love, or something close to it, but it never uses the word. Its main idea is that we know people the way a lake knows a mountain, in pieces that the next breeze scatters, and that what we are left with is often an outline traced by everything that went missing.