A visionary, we usually assume, sees what the rest of us can't: the future, the heavens, some grand design. Dave Bonta's poem quietly turns that idea around. In seven short lines, "Visionary" suggests that real vision is a way of looking, and a humble one. It means seeing people as kin, seeing the world and the body freshly, and then, hardest of all, not trying to own what you see.
The poem has no sentences in the usual sense. It is built from infinitives, "to see" repeated like the start of a definition or a private set of instructions. The first one is the most demanding: "to see the poor as us." The grammar is blunt. We might expect "as ourselves" or "as we are," but "as us" squeezes the poor and "us" together with one small word between them. There is no sermon about charity here, only a request to close the distance. The next line, "to see double," can be read in two ways. Double vision is a fault, what happens when you're dizzy or drunk, yet here it sounds like a gift. To see the poor as us is itself a kind of double seeing: holding two people, or two positions, in one glance.
The middle stanza, the longest, supplies the poem's images, and they work in pairs, as if the poem were seeing double. "The world like a breast" is a bold simile. It makes the world round, warm and nourishing, something we are fed by before we have words for it. Then comes "the body as odd a sight / as well water." The phrasing is slightly crooked, and that suits the meaning. A well is an ordinary object, yet looking down into one is strange: a dark circle, a sky caught underground, perhaps your own face looking back. The body, which we live in so constantly that we stop noticing it, is declared just as odd. "Sight" also quietly puns on the poem's theme. The breast and the well are both sources that give something life-sustaining, so the stanza links body and world through nourishment. The lines have no verb of their own. They hang from the earlier "to see," which suggests that seeing is what makes the comparisons possible.
The final stanza changes direction. "To see something fleet" is deliberately vague. We are not told what it is, only that it is quick and passing. The word "something" refuses to pin it down, and that vagueness is part of the point. Then comes the poem's most important move: "and let be." Instead of grasping, photographing or explaining the fleeting thing, the speaker lets it go on being what it is. It's a surprising ending after the word "visionary," which usually promises possession of a secret. Here the highest act of seeing is restraint. One can even read the poem's own vagueness as practising what it preaches, since it points at the thing without trapping it.
Formally, the poem is spare. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so the lines drift into one another and the poem never announces a full stop. The stanzas run two lines, then three, then two, with the image-heavy stanza held in the middle like something cupped between two hands. Sound does gentle work in place of rhyme. The long "ee" of "see" opens the poem and returns, unstressed but audible, in the closing "be," so the end answers the beginning. The last two words, "let be," are both stressed monosyllables, which slows the line and makes it settle.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from so little. In a handful of lines it joins three kinds of seeing that rarely sit together: ethical (the poor as us), imaginative (the world as breast, the body as well water) and restrained (letting the fleeting thing be). It redefines "visionary" as someone who is attentive, generous and willing to leave things alone. A reader who finishes it may look at the next stranger, or the next strange, ordinary thing, a little differently.