Dave Bonta's poem begins with a pun that turns out to be a serious proposal. Say "plane" and most people picture a jet, but by the first line we are at a workbench with a hand tool. The title sets a small trap, and the first section springs it by mapping the two meanings onto each other. The plane's front handle becomes a propeller, its rear handle a tail, and the opening where the blade protrudes stands in for landing gear. Even the flat steel "frog," the part that holds the blade, is promoted to the plane's only "chance of flying." A frog is an animal that hops rather than soars, so the joke lies in the word itself: this machine's idea of flight is a small, stubborn jump. The wood is the "sky," and the plane glides across it.
The poem's structure is as tidy as a well-planed board. There are three numbered sections of exactly six lines each, written in free verse with no end rhyme. The music comes from smaller things. In "no tail but the tote," the two t-sounds click together like parts of a tool. "Flat steel frog" packs three consonant clusters into three syllables. The first section also runs on a repeated pattern, "no ... but ...," which lists what the plane lacks and then shows what it has instead. The ampersands in "the mouth & the blade" and "& down" give the page a hurried, workshop look, like notes jotted on a scrap of lumber.
In the second section the playfulness gives way to aphorism. "The carpenter's plane touches down / & down" repeats its last word to suggest pass after pass, a landing that keeps happening. The shavings become surf: "Chips curl in a wave / that never stops breaking." Then comes the poem's most important pun, which is quieter than the first: "all planes are bound to the planet." The word "plane" sits inside "planet," so the sound itself seems to rule out escape. But the section ends on a paradox: "The only route out leads farther in." Read against the woodworking, this makes sense, because planing takes the surface away and reaches what lies beneath. The poem suggests that real departure comes from going deeper into a material, a task or oneself, and not from leaving the ground.
The third section brings in the wider world with "When the carpenter's plane got to Japan," a phrase that sounds like a flight arriving at its destination. Japanese hand planes are traditionally pulled toward the body rather than pushed away, and the poem builds on that fact: the tool "began to work in reverse," and "there's always more power in the homeward pull." The tool then turns into a creature. It goes out "hungry" and returns "digesting fragments light as air," which makes sense because the blade has a mouth and the shavings are what it has eaten. The final line is the most surprising: "dangerous with the scent of new surfaces." Shavings weigh almost nothing, so "dangerous" seems out of place, but the word may point to the pull of fresh-cut wood, or to the risk of coming back changed. That is my reading of it, since the poem does not explain. I find the unexplained word more interesting than an explained one would have been.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It starts with a visual pun and ends with a view of how a life might be lived. Two kinds of movement, outward flight and inward work, are set against each other, and the poem decides in favour of the second without lecturing. The title calls it an "ode," a form usually reserved for grand subjects, so the poem also praises a humble tool in a mock-lofty voice and then shows the tool deserves it. Because the airplane never quite disappears from the language ("touches down," "landing gear," "got to Japan"), the poem keeps the longing to fly alive while it argues that the ground, taken seriously enough, is somewhere to go.