Most laments mourn something taken away. Dave Bonta's "Lament" mourns something the speaker gave away, bit by bit, for the sake of looking closely at the world. It opens with two questions, "How many friends have I neglected" and "How many friendships have withered", and neither gets a number. The poem never tallies the cost. It shows what the speaker was doing instead: waiting for January shadows, watching clouds cross a forest pool "dark with tannins," stalking a slug along a log. The guilt is real, but the evidence the poem offers is a list of pleasures.
That tension drives the whole piece. The language of loss is plain, while the language of attention is vivid and exact. The pool is "ephemeral," the log "orange with fungi," and the slug glides "on an instant carpet" and retracts "the stilts of its eyes / all the way into its head." The word "agog" gives the game away. The speaker is delighted, and the delight spills across the line breaks. Even the verbs of obsession are slightly predatory: he doesn't watch the slug, he *stalks* it, as if devotion to nature were a kind of hunt. The slug may also be a quiet self-portrait. Its eyes pull back inside its head, much as the speaker pulls back from other people.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no steady metre. Its sentences run long and its lines break on small, unstressed words ("waiting for / the long shadows", "like / a yellow birch sapling"). The reader keeps tipping forward, the way one does on a walk. Against this, the poem's shortest lines land hard. "how to edit." is a full stop in the middle of the stream. The sentence it ends is the poem's confession: "I've lost friends & learned how to be / merciless with myself – I mean, / how to edit." The dash and the retreat into "I mean" make the speaker seem to catch himself mid-sentence. He starts to say something harsher about himself and swaps in a writer's word for it. The pun works both ways. Editing is cutting, and cutting is what he has done to his social life. The ampersands used throughout add to the effect of a handwritten, slightly hurried voice.
The turn comes with "Living in this mountain hollow," and the speaker's next line sounds rehearsed: "I tell myself I could never take / the same walk twice." The phrase "I tell myself" admits that this is a justification, and the poem does not quite trust it. The word "hollow" then returns, transformed, in the closing image. This is a literal place, a valley between mountains, but by the last line it has become an emptiness.
That final image carries most of the poem's meaning. A yellow birch seedling sprouts on top of a hemlock stump. As the stump rots, the birch wraps it in "an apron of roots," a domestic, almost tender picture. A hundred years on, the stump is gone, yet the tree "still preserves, unseen, / the hollow shape of the corpse / that gave it life." The image can be read in several ways. The speaker has planted himself in the hollow like the birch, and his roots may be closing around the shape of the friendships that fed him. Or the lost friends are the stump, rotted away but still giving the shape of the tree its form. Or the speaker will one day be the stump himself. The poem doesn't choose. What it does insist on is that absence has a shape and can be carried, unseen, inside something that is thriving.
This is why the poem matters. It avoids both nature worship and easy remorse. Attention to the natural world is shown as a real good that costs something real, and the poem lets both facts stand. Its title promises grief, and what we get is a mixture of grief, rapture and quiet self-suspicion. That mixture feels closer to how people actually live with their choices.