Waking is usually described as an arrival, but Dave Bonta's tanka treats it as a loss. In five short lines, a voice from sleep slips away and, in the moment of transition, turns into the song of a wood thrush. The speaker answers with a question, "who are you," and then with a small physical act: pulling the comforter up. The poem never says who the voice belonged to. It shows us someone trying to stay where the voice was.
The grammar enacts the vanishing. The poem opens on "Vanishing," a participle with no stated subject, so we can't be sure what is disappearing: the voice, the dream, or the speaker's hold on both. The lines carry no punctuation, which makes them flow into one another and leaves the reader to decide where to pause. "Changing," in the second line, is another unfinished action. We catch the voice mid-transformation and never see it settle into one thing. It moves from something human and particular to something beautiful but impersonal. The wood thrush has a liquid, flute-like song, and that sound may be literally outside the window, so that the real morning seems to be leaking into the dream. That is an inference, but the order of the lines supports it: the bird arrives just as the voice leaves.
The form works in the same way. A tanka traditionally has five lines, and in Japanese the pattern is 5-7-5-7-7 sound units. English versions often loosen it. Here the syllables run roughly 6-7-3-7-7, so the poem keeps the long, drifting lines of a tanka but cuts the middle one down to three words. That short line is the hinge. After two lines of soft, unfolding description, "who are you" comes out like a gasp. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, so the rhythm comes from the contrast between the long lines and this blunt interruption. The sound of the question is also tied to the bird. The rounded vowels of "wood," "who" and "you" nearly echo one another, as if the speaker were calling back in the thrush's own voice.
The last two lines turn from mystery to texture. "Comforter" is an ordinary word for a bedcover, but it also means one who comforts, and in this context the double meaning feels deliberate. The speaker has lost a voice and reaches for the nearest thing that can console. "Tangled blankets" shows a restless night, and it also echoes the tangled, half-remembered threads of the dream itself. The poem hints at no other person in the bed, and I wouldn't claim one, but the phrase is intimate enough to let a reader wonder. The verbs "pull" and "up over" describe a gesture of retreat, almost childlike, like hiding to keep the day out. After the strangeness of the opening, the domestic detail feels very close to the body, and it is the only answer the poem gives.
That refusal to answer is where the poem gets its force. The question "who are you" could be aimed at the dream voice, at the bird, or at the speaker's own half-awake self, and the poem lets all three readings stand. The speaker isn't solving anything, only reluctant to let go. The natural world, represented by the thrush, is what ends the dream, and the speaker's quiet resistance is to burrow back under the covers.
This is what makes so small a poem worth reading closely. In about twenty words it captures a moment almost everyone knows, when something felt in sleep is fading faster than we can name it and we try to keep it by staying still. Tanka has long been a form for longing and fleeting feeling, and Bonta uses it well, pairing a brief surreal image with an equally brief physical gesture and leaving the space between them open. The reader finishes the poem as the speaker does, under the blankets, still asking.