A whole war arrives in this poem as a label, and a whole relationship as a single piece of furniture. Dave Bonta gives us three short lines: "a letter from the war / I try being the ice / in our bed." We never learn which war, who is writing, or who is reading. Everything the poem wants to say has to pass through one strange, cold image.
The title, "Correspondence," does a lot of quiet work. It names the letter, but it also means a matching, one thing answering to another. The writer is setting up a correspondence between two places: the war where he or she is, and the bed at home. The ice is the bridge. The first line can be read as a subtitle or as the poem's opening line, and the ambiguity suits a poem about being in two places at once. Either way, it is lowercase and unpunctuated, like a note-to-self or the heading on an envelope. The "I" of line two gets the poem's only capital letter, as though the voice only steps forward once the letter has been opened.
The ice is the poem's puzzle, and it can be read several ways. The simplest reading is that the writer, absent from the bed, tries to imagine being its coldness. The empty half of a bed is cold, so the writer will be that cold, a presence made out of absence. A second reading hears numbness: ice is what a person might try to become to survive a war, with feelings frozen so they can't hurt. The word "try" matters here. "I try being" is tentative and ongoing, and it admits that this is hard to do or to sustain. The poem doesn't say whether the effort works. Ice also melts, and a bed is a place of body heat, so the image holds a small tension. Is the writer the cold that the partner's warmth will drive out, or the cold that survives it? The poem leaves both possibilities open. Letters from war traditionally reassure ("I am well, I am warm"), and this one does the opposite, confessing a strange kind of closeness through discomfort.
The construction is spare but careful. The lines run six syllables, six syllables, then three, and each carries about three beats before the last shrinks to "in our bed." The poem seems to trail off, the way a letter does when the writer has run out of paper or nerve. There is no rhyme in the usual sense, but the sounds still link up. The long "i" of "I," "try" and "ice" chimes three times in a single line, which makes the middle of the poem ring with a thin, brittle note, fitting for ice. Another echo is easier to miss. The first line ends on "war," and the last line contains "our." The words sound close, and they pull two worlds together: the huge public event and the most private thing two people share. The word "our" also quietly insists that the bed is still jointly owned, even though only one of them is in it.
The line break after "ice" lets the word stand alone for a moment, hard and complete, before "in our bed" drops it into a domestic setting. Without the break, "the ice" might sound like weather or landscape. With it, the reader first meets the cold as a bare fact and then learns where it has been placed.
The poem is significant for what it declines to do. It shows no battlefield and no casualties, and it makes no speech about the horror of war. Instead it measures war by what it does to a bed, which is one of the smallest and most intimate units of life. In just fourteen syllables it suggests longing, guilt, fear and an odd tenderness, and it does so with the compression of a haiku. Readers are left to supply the rest of the letter, which is probably the point. Any reader who has missed someone will know what kind of cold it means.