"There you are again" sounds like a greeting to someone who keeps turning up, and that sets the tone of Bonta's poem. The child of the title never existed, yet the speaker treats this figure as a familiar visitor, someone already known and already worried over. The child comes "hollering / just for the company of the echo," a startling first image of loneliness. This is a creature so alone that its own voice coming back counts as company.
The next lines give the child a body, and the portrait is unflattering on purpose. The child is "bucktoothed, nearsighted / & hollow-eyed from insomnia, the family curse." The humor is real, but the details also bind the two together. "Hollering" and "hollow" share a sound, so the poem echoes itself just as the child's shout does. This suggests the imagined child is partly the speaker's own double, a way of looking at himself from outside. The labels that follow, "long-distance runner, / apostate, follower of game trails," all describe someone who leaves the main road. The speaker doesn't say he disapproves. He says "I know you," and that sounds like recognition.
Then the tone darkens. "I see already your ruin, inevitable as oxygen." The simile makes ruin as ordinary as breathing, and oxygen is also what rusts and burns things, so the line holds both comfort and threat. A parent's foresight here is mostly dread, the certainty that this temperament will suffer as the speaker's has. Yet the next sentence brings tenderness. The birds "who never spoke to me" call the child "by name." There is a flicker of envy in that, and a flicker of hope that the child will be welcomed by a world the speaker felt shut out of. He immediately undercuts it: "as if the world could possibly miss / one more neurotic primate lover." The phrase "primate" cuts humanity down to a zoological specimen, and "lover" is pleasingly slippery. It could mean someone who loves apes, or simply a creature too capable of love for its own good. The self-mockery keeps the poem from sentimentality, but the joke stings.
Formally, the poem is a single unrhymed stanza of free verse with no fixed meter. Its rhythm is that of someone thinking aloud, with short lines that run on or stop abruptly. The ampersands add to the casual, private feel. The grammar is built on verbs of perception: "There you are," "I know you," "I see," "I hear." The speaker conjures the child through attention, as if looking hard enough could make someone exist.
The last five lines turn away from the child toward a place. Bindweed, a clinging, strangling plant, "sheds its leaves / & turns to gold filagree in the lilac." Something usually unwelcome becomes ornament once its leaves fall and only the pattern of stems is left. Below it lie "the graves of the strangers / whose whiskey bottles I have placed, / green & purple, in the windows / to catch the winter sun." The syntax is slightly knotty, but the picture is clear enough. The speaker has taken other people's emptied bottles and made them into colored glass. Gold, green and purple are the poem's only colors, and they arrive just as the talk of curses and ruin ends.
That ending offers a quiet answer to the childlessness the poem begins with. The speaker has no one to pass his genes to, but he has habits of attention: noticing the weed's gold, setting bottles where winter light will find them. The poem suggests, without saying so, that what one can leave behind is a way of making beauty from leftovers, the discarded and the dead included. It also suggests that the imagined child may never have been just a child. Judging by the "family curse" and the shared hollowness, the child may also embody the speaker's own odd, wandering self.
The poem is significant for holding so many feelings in so little space. Tenderness, dread, envy and dry comedy sit together without any being settled. It never says that it mourns, but the longing shows in the way the child keeps coming back, hollering at the edge of the page.