Walking is usually a way of getting away from yourself for a while. In Dave Bonta's "Boulevardier," it is how the speaker enlarges himself. The poem is barely thirty words long, yet it makes a complete small argument: I go out into the city, the city is both glittering and greasy, and I am still alive in it, stubbornly and a little playfully.
The title sets up a certain expectation. A boulevardier, in the word's French origin, is someone who haunts the boulevards, an urbane stroller and man about town. The word promises leisure and a touch of swagger. The poem then complicates that promise, because this walker is not idling. He walks "to magnify my heart," which gives the stroll a purpose. "Magnify" works on several levels. It can mean to enlarge, as a lens does, and the heart can be literal (walking is exercise) or figurative (feeling, courage, attention). The verb also has a devotional ring: in the King James Bible, Mary says her soul "doth magnify the Lord." The speaker praises nothing outside himself, though. The object of magnifying is "my heart," which is half comic and half sincere, a small act of self-devotion.
The second couplet gives the poem its best image: "into the city / of gold and bacon." The pairing is funny, and it also tells us a lot. Gold suggests wealth, glitter, the fabled golden city. Bacon suggests breakfast, grease, appetite, the body, and perhaps the idiom of "bringing home the bacon," earning a living. Set side by side, they make the city a place of luxury and ordinary hunger, money and meat. The grand word is undercut by the humble one, and the humble one is lifted by the grand. The sounds help: two short, round-voweled nouns joined by a flat little "and," like items on a shop sign. The speaker walks toward all of this with what feels like appetite rather than disdain.
The final couplet is the hardest to read. "I am not without life" is a double negative, a cautious understatement. He does not claim to be full of life, only not without it, as though life were something that could easily be lost. Then comes the simile: "like the play in plague." One way to read it is as wordplay. "Play" and "plague" share their opening sound and almost their spelling, so the simile asks us to hear one word tucked inside the other. Another way is through meaning. "Play" can be frolic or theatre, but it can also be the slack in a joint or rope, the small give that keeps a mechanism from seizing. Even in plague, the poem suggests, there is some looseness and some game, a margin of life that sickness cannot close. The poem never says what the plague is. Judging by the imagery, it could be a literal danger in the city or a figure for crowds, money and grime, and the poem is stronger for leaving that open.
The form is spare. There are three unrhymed couplets, no punctuation and no capital letters except the pronoun "I." The lines are short, and the opening "I walk" is a single step before the longer lines follow. Rhyme is absent at the ends of lines, but the sound is far from random. A long "i" runs through the poem: "I," "magnify," "my," "I," "life," "like." That repeated sound acts as a drumbeat for the self and a kind of internal rhyme. "Life" and "like" sit side by side across the line, almost rhyming in the middle of a line instead of at the end.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much each word does. The walk is exercise and a kind of prayer, the city is treasure and breakfast, and "plague" is a threat and a pun. The speaker's claim is also modest. A boast of vitality would be easy to ignore, but "not without life" feels earned, like something said by a person who has noticed how close the alternative is. The poem supplies no date or setting, so it is best taken on its own terms, as a few steps through a strange city in which the walker finds a little room to play.