Dave Bonta's "Riddle" never says what it is, but the clues pile up quickly: a "slender leaf among leaves," something that lives "under the covers," that marks "where the eyes fell shut." The answer is a bookmark. The poem speaks in the bookmark's own voice and turns a scrap of paper or card into a small philosophy of attention, interruption and return.
The opening lines work as a kind of double vision. A "leaf" is both a page and a plant, so the speaker is a stray page hidden among pages. It "divide[s] the seen from the unseen," which is literally what a bookmark does, separating the pages you've read from the ones you haven't. Calling itself a "haphazard stand-in for the present" is a sharp idea. The reader's moment inside the story can't be saved, so this flat object holds it in place.
Much of the poem's pleasure lies in its metaphors for silence. The bookmark describes itself as "a caesura, or a rest in a score," borrowing terms from poetry and music for a pause that belongs to the structure. Then comes the image of a "solitary scarecrow buried up to its neck / in a field of white," which suits a bookmark with its top poking out of the pages. The white field is the page, and the crows it guards against are "the crows of forgetfulness, / which are also (of course) white / as a blank page." The parenthetical "(of course)" is a wry, conversational touch. It also makes an unsettling point: forgetting looks like blankness, the same white as the field it threatens.
The third stanza deepens the mood. "I mark where the mind left off, / where the lips ceased their murmur, / where the eyes fell shut." The repeated "where" and the three body parts (mind, lips, eyes) give the lines a slow, lulling rhythm, as if the reader is drifting toward sleep. The old habit of murmuring while reading is gently recalled. Read another way, the lines have a shadow of mortality, since they describe someone stopping and not necessarily resuming. That is why the next image matters. The bookmark must be "flat as the tongue of an angel, / for whom all flavors are one, & sturdy / as the hope of continuance." The angel's tongue is a strange, lovely comparison. It is flat and tasteless, neutral to every flavor, just as the bookmark doesn't care what book it sits in. Yet "sturdy" attaches to something abstract, the hope that you will come back and carry on.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no end rhyme and no regular meter. Its music comes from smaller things: the soft, repeated *l* sounds of "slender leaf among leaves," the balance of "seen" and "unseen," and the long, unhurried sentences that make pauses feel earned. The ampersand in "& sturdy" adds a casual, handwritten look, like a note jotted in a margin. The stanzas vary in length, so the poem has uneven pauses of its own, much like a book left open and shut at different points.
The last stanza shifts from description to relationship: "We meet often, you and I, / but only under the covers." The phrase puns on bed covers and book covers, making reading a private, almost intimate act. Then the tone turns humbler: "You use me & set me aside." The bookmark knows it is disposable, and it may once have been "a paperclip, a shopping list, a postcard, / the receipt from a cash register — / some briefly useful crutch." That list of ordinary scraps is quietly funny, and also touching, because it suggests how readily people pick up whatever is nearby to save their place.
The final command, "Riddle me," is double-edged. It invites the reader to solve the puzzle, but it also asks to be taken seriously. That is what makes the poem worth reading. Riddles in which an everyday object speaks in the first person are an old tradition, and Bonta uses that familiar form to make us notice something we normally forget. The bookmark is nearly invisible, yet it records the reader's pauses and their intention to return.