Four sentences, the longest only ten words, and each one sounds like something you ought to recognise. That is the trick of "Proverbial (10)". The title promises folk wisdom, and the number in brackets suggests one piece in a longer sequence. But the lines keep slipping out of the shape of the sayings they imitate. A real proverb hands you a neat conclusion, whereas these four leave you with a puzzle. The poem is about how fixed and unfixed things are: selves that will not stay put, a gaze that pins people down, a landscape that gives nothing back.
The first line sets the tone: "All self-things change." The sweeping "All" and the present tense are pure proverb. The hyphenated "self-things" is not. Bonta turns the self into an object, one item in a general inventory of things that alter. The word is faintly clinical and a little comic, and it quietly deflates the idea of a precious, permanent identity. Even the rhythm is flat and final, three stressed beats with no ornament.
The second stanza is the only one that breaks across two lines, and it opens up the most. "To see and be seen / is to be taken prisoner." The doubled verb, with "see" and "seen" almost mirroring each other, makes looking sound like a trade in which both sides lose something. The line break does real work, because "To see and be seen" could be a happy phrase about connection until "prisoner" arrives and turns it into capture. The sibilance running through the line (*see*, *seen*, *is*, *prisoner*) gives it a hush, like something said under one's breath. Read next to the first line, it also sets up a tension. If every self changes, then being seen is an attempt to hold one still, and the observer is caught too. The grammar is ambiguous about who is imprisoned, and that ambiguity seems deliberate.
Then the poem turns outward: "The land would not answer the world." Here the tense shifts to the past and the "would not" suggests stubbornness, not mere absence. It reads like a line from a story rather than a maxim. The opposition of "land" and "world" is worth pausing on. Land is soil and ground, and "world" suggests something larger, more human, more demanding. The world calls, questions and claims, and the land stays mute. "Answer" can mean to reply, but it can also mean to correspond to or be answerable for. Either way, something that ought to connect two things does not. Set against the previous stanza, it extends the poem's sense of a separation that can't be closed, between seer and seen and now between place and everything that wants to speak to it.
The last line is the strangest: "Take no ice for ungrateful pains." It sounds like a mangled idiom, and the nearest familiar phrase is "cut no ice," meaning to make no impression. Bonta bends it into an instruction. "Pains" carries the old sense of taking pains, meaning effort, and "ungrateful" suggests that effort has gone unthanked. Ice is the image the whole poem has been waiting for, since it is water that has been arrested and made solid. Read this way, the closing advice might be: don't accept something frozen as payment for your trouble, whether that is a fixed image of a person or a cold answer from the land. It is also possible to hear "pains" as "panes", a window of ice you can look through but not touch, which would echo the seeing and imprisoning of stanza two. That is an inference from sound, not something the text states, but the poem's compression invites such double hearing.
None of the lines has rhyme, and the free-verse lines are short and separated by white space, so each one gets a pause to settle or to fail to. That spacing is part of the poem's argument, since the sentences do not explain one another. What makes the poem worth reading is its use of an old, authoritative form to say that certainty is hard to come by. It borrows the voice of inherited wisdom and uses it to question whether wisdom can reach the self, the gaze or the ground.