In six short lines, Dave Bonta's "Shifting ground" fits a legal oath, a crisis of confidence and a farmyard purchase into one train of thought. It starts in the most abstract place imaginable, the speaker's distrust of their own language, and ends with a hand on an animal's body. The central idea seems to be that words, however solemnly given, keep changing the things they describe, while touch offers a steadier kind of knowing.
The first couplet borrows the vocabulary of commitment. To "sign and swear" is to put your name on paper and your word under oath, yet the speaker immediately undercuts both. The opening "however" is slippery. It can mean "no matter how I sign and swear", but it also has the feel of a "nevertheless" that interrupts a thought before it has begun. Then comes the real confession: "word by word what have I not altered". There is no question mark, so the line trails off as an admission rather than a real inquiry. The repeated "word by word" has a plodding beat, the slow labour of writing one unit after another, and each unit is a chance for the truth to shift. "Altered" is the key word. Judging by the context, it could refer to revising a draft, bending a memory or changing oneself, and the poem lets all of these hang together.
The second couplet turns on "descend". The speaker moves "from one private doubt" to "a private land", and the repeated "private" links the two places while the nouns pull them apart: a doubt is something held in the mind, a land is something you can stand on. The title's "shifting ground" is an idiom for an unstable position, but here it also becomes literal terrain, and "descend" works for both. It suggests walking down a slope as easily as sinking into worry. Whether "private land" means an inner country or a piece of property, the poem doesn't say, and that ambiguity is part of its design. Notice too the phrase "one private doubt", which hints that this is only one doubt among many, a step in a series.
Then comes the surprise. "And buy a pig like a physician / feeling her pulse" carries on grammatically as if buying a pig were the obvious next move. The simile is odd and funny. The buyer becomes a doctor, a figure of careful, trusted judgement, while the patient is a farm animal. The sound helps the humour along, because "pig", "physician" and "pulse" are all stitched together by their p's, an echo of the earlier "private". The pig is also "her", not "it", so she is treated as an individual. "Feeling" quietly puns on touch and emotion, as though the speaker's vague unease has finally found something physical to hold. A pulse can be checked by a hand in a way that an oath cannot. There may be a small irony here as well, since a purchase is itself a transaction that words and signatures will probably seal, so language has not been escaped, only set aside for a moment.
The form is as unsettled as the subject. There are three unrhymed couplets, with no capitals and no punctuation to close any sentence. The lines are mostly plain, one-syllable words, with a few Latinate ones ("descend", "physician", "altered") standing out like landmarks. The couplets also grow more lopsided. The first runs roughly seven syllables to nine, the second eight to five, the third nine to four. The final line, "feeling her pulse", is the shortest in the poem, as if the thought comes to rest in a single palm-sized gesture.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to tidy up. It never says whether the pig is a comfort or just a fresh uncertainty, whether the speaker has found solid ground or simply a different patch of it. It gives the reader a feeling familiar to anyone who has rewritten a sentence five times and still not trusted it, along with a small, practical answer: when words won't hold still, put your hand on something that has a heartbeat.