Six lines, a few plain words and a kitchen: Dave Bonta's "Reduction" holds more than its size suggests, which is what its title promises. To reduce a sauce is to simmer it until the water is gone and only concentrated flavour remains. The poem does this first to an idea about pleasure, then to the speaker.
The opening tercet reads like a proverb with a recipe hidden inside it: "every pleasure begins / somehow as powder / and a lax fire." The claim is unglamorous. Pleasure starts as something dry and unpromising, like ground spice, flour or ash, and "somehow" admits the speaker can't fully explain how it turns into delight. "Powder" next to "fire" might also hint at gunpowder, a flicker of danger, but "lax" defuses it. A lax fire is slack and unhurried, a simmer rather than a blaze. That one adjective carries the stanza's argument: the best pleasures want patience and a loose grip, not force. The lack of punctuation helps. Nothing in the poem has a full stop, so the stanza trails off into "fire" like a pot left on the heat.
Then the voice changes. The second tercet moves from statement to address: "remember my ham bone / refresh me in us / that I may be Secretary of Stew." The grammar has the shape of a petition, with two imperatives followed by a purpose clause ("that I may be"). The poem never says who is being asked. It could be a god, a cook, the fire or the reader, and that openness lets the kitchen take on the weight of an altar without anyone announcing it.
The ham bone is the best image in the poem. It is what is left once the meat has been eaten, the part most people would throw away, yet it is what gives a pot of soup its depth. By calling it "my" ham bone, the speaker offers himself as the leftover, the stripped-down remainder that still has something to give. Reduction becomes a metaphor for a life boiled down to what is useful. The odd preposition in "refresh me in us" supports this. We expect "refresh me with" something, but "in us" dissolves the singular "me" into a plural, the way a bone's flavour disappears into the broth it enriches. The renewal is communal, not private.
The last line turns the register comic. "Secretary of Stew" is a mock-governmental title, and it is the only place the poem uses capital letters, so the one grand gesture sits in a field of lowercase. The ambition is absurdly humble: not to rule anything, only to hold an office in the pot. The sounds suit the joke, with the hissing s's of "Secretary" and "Stew" bracketing the line, and the soft, round closing syllable lets the poem settle rather than snap shut. One might also hear in "secretary" the older sense of a keeper of secrets, which would make the stew's office a quiet guardianship of whatever happens in the simmering. That is an interpretation rather than something the poem states, but it fits the first stanza's "somehow."
The form carries its own small irony. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short lines of about five or six syllables. Then the final line stretches to roughly nine, easily the longest, in a poem called "Reduction." After all that boiling down, the closing title swells with mock importance, so the poem both practises compression and laughs at how pompous we get about our roles.
The poem is worth reading because it holds reverence and humour in one small pot without letting either spoil the other. It treats cooking as a kind of devotion, pleasure as something earned slowly from dry beginnings, and selfhood as something that gains meaning by being given up to a shared dish. It also works as a model of how a short poem operates: strip away the water, keep what carries flavour, and trust the reader to taste it.