Bonta starts with a horror-movie cliché, the moment someone shouts "It's alive!", and then flips it. What if the dead feel that same shock when we, the living, disturb them? The speaker imagines us from below the ground: roots, pickaxes, larvae and blind snouts pushing into their rest. We become the monsters, "dangerous as magma," creeping and crawling into a place where we don't belong.
The tone is darkly playful but also strangely tender. The speaker doesn't seem frightened so much as fascinated by how living and dead depend on each other. We are the "zero in their bones" and the "throw of their dice," a kind of bad luck and a kind of chance at once. The ending moves toward something quieter. Until the sun finally merges everyone, we meet only in brief "spasms." The closing image of film credits, listing "moan, rattle / & almost imperceptible sigh," leaves a mood that is eerie, wry, and oddly gentle.