Three lines, two questions, and not one question mark: Dave Bonta's "Solo" asks what happens to a person who learns to dance, then leaves the asking in the air, as if the wind had already carried it off. The speaker imagines two outcomes that pull in opposite directions. Either the wind will "lose me in the garden," so that the dancer becomes so much a part of the moving world that no one can find them, or the speaker will "prove a third wing," an extra part that doesn't match the pair. One fear is of vanishing, the other of sticking out. The poem lives in the narrow space between them.
Everything hangs on its opening condition, "if I learn to dance." The speaker is a beginner, and the dance hasn't happened yet. That makes the poem a mixture of hope and nervousness, and it treats dancing as something that changes your relationship to the air and the ground around you. The verb "lose" is slippery. The wind might misplace the speaker carelessly, the way a dance partner loses the beat, or the speaker might slip out of its grip on purpose. The poem seems to cast the wind as a partner who leads, and a partner who leads can also let go.
The poem's shape works quietly. Counting syllables gives five, nine, then six. The first line is short and plain, as modest as a beginner's first step. The second stretches out, and "lose me in the garden" fills it so that the line itself seems to wander off. The third pulls back in, tight and a little abrupt. There is no rhyme, but the sounds still tie things together. "Will" opens both questions, and it carries a second meaning of wanting or intending beneath the plain future tense. "Wind" and "wing" share their opening and closing sounds, so the strange third wing seems to grow out of the weather itself. The typography adds something too. Apart from the title, the only capital letter is the "I," one small upright self in a lowercase world.
"Third wing" is the oddest image, and the most interesting. Wings come in pairs, and the pair is what makes a bird, an angel or a butterfly balanced. A third wing is a flaw in that symmetry. It might be a useless growth or a gift of extra lift, and the word "prove" keeps both readings alive. To prove is to demonstrate, to test, and also to turn out to be, so the speaker is asking what they will turn out to be as well as what they will show. The poem doesn't say whose wings the two others are. Perhaps they belong to the wind and the garden together, imagined as one winged creature, or perhaps they are the dancer's own outstretched arms. In either case, the speaker wonders whether they would complete the shape or only spoil it.
Then there is the title. "Solo" promises one person alone, but the poem quickly fills up. The wind, the garden and a pair of wings are all there, and the count runs on to "third." A solo dancer turns out not to be solitary at all. Dancing, the poem hints, is a way of entering company, even when that company is only air and plants. The title also gives the poem a faint irony, since a performance meant to show one person off is imagined as a risk of being lost.
What gives the poem weight is how much worry it fits into so little space. Any new skill, whether physical or artistic, raises the same private questions. Will I dissolve into it, or will I stand out awkwardly from it? The poem doesn't answer. Without punctuation to close the questions, the reader is left in the same unsteady, hopeful position as the speaker, a few steps into a garden with the wind just starting to move.