Three lines, no verb, no punctuation, not one capital letter: Dave Bonta's "Night music" gives us a picture and then pulls the floor away. The picture is a pole in the dark with a deer carcass hanging from it. The surprise comes at the end, where the venison is said to be bled "as mightily" as "the night in a viol." A hunter's chore and a musical instrument end up sharing one image.
The grammar matters here. The first line is only a noun phrase, "a mast to hang venison." Nobody acts, and no hunter is named. Only the tool remains. Because no sentence ever finishes, the poem feels less like a statement than like something hung up for inspection, which is exactly what the mast is for.
"Mast" is an interesting choice of word. Most readers think of a ship first, a tall upright spar, and that picture lends the pole a faint nautical grandeur, as if the night were a sea. The word also has a second sense in woodland usage: the acorns and nuts that fall from trees and feed wild animals. I can't say which the poet intended, but the word carries both a tall, sailing-ship dignity and a wild, wooded one. The deer swinging from it is, in a roundabout way, what the mast once fed.
The middle line is the shortest, around five syllables between two lines of about seven (the exact count depends on how you say "venison"). It is also the heaviest. "Mightily" is a big, slightly old-fashioned adverb, and it weighs down a line otherwise made of small words. Then comes "bled," a hard single syllable that works like a thud. The line break after it creates a moment of false completion. "as mightily bled" could be a whole thought, a plain fact about hung game, which really is bled. The next line begins with another "as," and the comparison turns the fact into a puzzle.
What is "the night in a viol"? A viol is a bowed string instrument with a hollow wooden body, played held upright, and the inside of that body is a small enclosed darkness. Music comes out of it the way blood comes out of the carcass. The poem seems to suggest that a sound is something drained from a body, and that the dark inside the instrument is what gets bled. There is a further link, which comes from the history of instruments rather than from anything the poem says: viol strings were traditionally made of animal gut. If that is in the poet's mind, the animal is present in both halves of the comparison, once hanging from the pole and once vibrating inside the wood.
The poem has no rhyme, but sound ties it together quietly. "Mightily" and "night" share the same long vowel and closing consonant, so the adverb of the middle line is echoed in the noun of the last. The two key nouns, "venison" and "viol," both begin with a v and sit at the ends of the first and last lines, like two posts holding the poem up. Even the short, flat "a" of "mast" and "hang" gives the opening line a creaking, rope-and-timber sound.
Notice, too, that the poem never names a sound. "Music" appears only in the title, and the viol appears only as a container of night. Everything audible is implied. You might hear a creak of rope or a slow drip, but the poem leaves that to the reader. The silence is part of the effect, because the music is bled out of the poem as well.
The central idea is that music, like butchery, is a kind of letting out. Beauty here is not a polished surface but something drawn from a body at a cost, and night is the vessel that holds and releases it. The poem is significant because it does this in about twenty syllables. It joins rough rural work with the refinement of chamber music and lets neither cancel the other. A viol and a hanging carcass look like opposites, yet the poem shows that both are forms of drawn-out darkness.