A fetish is usually imagined as something you can hold: a carved figure, a charm, an object charged with a power it shouldn't have. Dave Bonta's short poem starts from that picture and quickly unsettles it. The fetish "embodies / what can never be touched," a paradox that sets the tone. It is given a body, yet what it stands for stays out of reach. By the last line the poem has widened from a single strange object to something every reader shares, a loss that happened before memory began.
The opening is cool and slightly suspicious. "This thing called a fetish" sounds like someone reading a definition aloud while doubting it. The poem then supplies a description that is all texture and no tidy outline: "lump & twist / & rag-end." The words are blunt and monosyllabic, and the ampersands make them feel hurried and informal, as if the object were being listed from a quick, uneasy look. "Rag-end" suggests a scrap of cloth, something left over, which fits the idea that this thing is "best kept out of view." Its ugliness carries a hint of shame.
Then the grammar changes. "To see it exposed, one must assume / the burden of its origins, one must / remake oneself." The repeated "one must," with the impersonal "one," sounds like a ritual instruction or a rule of initiation. The line breaks help. "One must" hangs at the end of a line, so the obligation arrives before we know what it is. "Assume" works two ways. It means to take on a responsibility, and it also means to put something on, like a garment. Either way, looking at this object isn't passive. The viewer has to be altered first, and the price of seeing is a change in who is looking.
The middle of the poem moves from the human scale to the geological. "It lives / in a buried season, carboniferous." The break after "lives" gives the object a moment of animation before it is buried. "Carboniferous" is the longest, most Latinate word in the poem, and it stands out among the short rough ones. It names the geological age that gave coal its name, when huge amounts of plant life were buried and compressed. That is a useful image for what the poem is circling: life pressed into dark, dense matter and stored for an immense time. Calling it a "season" rather than an era also makes deep time feel personal and cyclical, like something that was once weather.
The ending is the poem's turn. "It is the solid shadow / we abandoned in the womb." After the formal "one," the word "we" suddenly includes everyone, and the fetish becomes a shared inheritance. The phrase "solid shadow" is an oxymoron that answers the opening paradox. A shadow is the most untouchable thing there is, but here it has weight. "Abandoned" is a harsh verb, with some guilt in it. We did not simply lose this thing; we left it. The poem never says what it is. It might be a twin, a discarded part of the body, or an unlived version of the self, and the poem's refusal to choose keeps the idea from hardening into a neat explanation. The reading is open, but the direction is clear: selfhood begins with something left behind.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its music comes from consonants and repetition: the clipped "lump" and "twist," the soft hissing of "season," "solid" and "shadow," and the echoing "one must." The brevity matters too. In ten lines it moves from anthropology (the fetish) to geology (the carboniferous) to the body (the womb), and each step goes further back in time.
The heading "Beginnings" and the title "Cibola 2 (old)" suggest this is one piece of a larger sequence, though the text alone doesn't tell us more. Cibola is the name of a legendary golden city that explorers sought and never found, and that echoes the poem's own subject, something always pursued and never grasped. What makes the poem worth reading is that it does not try to resolve this. It leaves us with an object we are told to see and told we cannot touch, and then suggests we have been carrying its shadow since before we were born.