Five short lines, no punctuation, not a single capital letter: Dave Bonta's "Two" looks as if it might slip away if you breathed on it, which suits a poem about how little it takes to hold two people together, and how briefly.
The opening line, "we held on", is the shortest in the poem, and it is already ambiguous. The next line, "two pieces of thin ice", arrives without the small word "to" that would settle the grammar. One reading is that the speaker and a companion clung on to two fragments of ice. The other is that "we" are the two pieces of thin ice, so that the title's "Two" names the pair. The poem never chooses, and the second reading is the more unsettling one. "Pieces" suggests something already broken off from a larger whole, like floes drifting apart. "Thin ice" brings in the old warning about danger. "Held on" can therefore mean holding each other, or simply holding out.
Then the poem shifts from ice to time: "where night leases day". The word "where" is a quiet trick, because it turns a moment (dusk, or perhaps the small hours) into a place you can stand. "Leases" is the poem's strangest and most interesting verb. A lease means one party temporarily lets another occupy something it does not truly give away. We can't tell which of night and day is the landlord and which the tenant, but either way nobody owns the hours. They are rented out and will be handed back. The sounds here are cold and sharp, with "night" and "ice" sharing a long *i* and "leases" echoing the hiss of "ice".
The simile that follows, "like a flat in London", is a deliberate drop in register. We move from frozen water and the turning of the sky to something ordinary, expensive and slightly comic: a rented flat in a crowded city. It is the only "like" in the poem, and it is the most down-to-earth image in it. The comparison does two things at once. It makes the exchange of night and day feel like a contract with terms and an end date, and, I'd suggest, it hints at the pair themselves, since a flat is also something two people share. The tenderness of the first lines is checked by a dry, almost wry tone.
The last line, "together till past one", can be read as a clock time, one o'clock at night. The phrase "till past" suggests the pair have stayed on beyond some expected limit and borrowed a little extra time. But the poem is titled "Two" and ends on the word "one", and it is hard not to hear the arithmetic. Perhaps two have become one, or perhaps they have outlasted the point of being one. That is a reading rather than a certainty, but the placement of the word invites it.
Bonta uses no rhyme, but sound still holds the poem together. The first line ends on "on" and the last on "one", and "London" sits between them. These closing words share a soft nasal *n*, and "one" and "London" share a vowel, so the poem finishes on a low hum instead of a click of rhyme. The lack of punctuation lets the whole thing run as a single unbroken sentence, almost a single breath, which makes the held-on feeling physical. The lines start short and then settle into a steady length, as if the speaker were finding their footing on the ice.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves unsaid. It gives no names, no cause and no outcome, and we never learn who "we" are or whether the ice holds. Instead it gives one idea: closeness is a kind of tenancy, a fragile arrangement made in borrowed time, and its value lies partly in its fragility. The poem doesn't mourn this. It sounds faintly pleased that the two lasted until "past one". In five lines it moves from danger to comedy to a small, quiet victory, and leaves the reader to decide how long the ice will bear their weight.