Proverbs usually promise to settle things. They hand us a truth in one tidy sentence and let us move on. Dave Bonta's "Proverbial (14)" borrows that confident voice, and the number in the title suggests it belongs to a longer run of such pieces. But the six lines never settle anything. They sound like wisdom while describing a world in which grief, pleasure and damage have swapped places.
The first two lines set up the logic of a saying: "A heart put in a closet / is a loss of great concern." The image is domestic and a little comic, a heart stored with the coats and the vacuum cleaner. Hiding the heart away is deliberate, and the poem calls the result a loss. Readers will probably also hear the phrase "in the closet," with its sense of concealment, though the poem never says so outright. The phrase "a loss of great concern" is stiff and official, the language of a notice or a report, and that coolness makes the line more unsettling. A heart is missing, and the poem files it away in the language of paperwork.
Then comes the turn. The conjunction "but" promises a contrast, and the parallel phrasing, "a heart put in a closet" against "a heart in the prison of sex," does look like the balanced structure of a proverb. The content refuses to balance, though. We expect the prison to be worse than the closet, since it is harsher, public and a punishment. Instead the heart there "will find too little to grieve for." The line is built on a paradox: the more completely the heart is confined, the less it can mourn. Whether that confinement has dulled the heart or filled it up, the poem leaves open. Either way, grief needs something left to lose, and the closeted heart is at least still missed. The line also ends on the small word "for," which leaves the grief unfinished.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run from about six syllables to nine, and they sound like speech that has been pressed down. The only music comes from small echoes: the hard *g* of "great" and "grieve," and the *p* of "put," "prison" and "pain." The short fifth line, "Ruin is our ointment," stands out in that loose pattern. It has three beats and no qualifications. It is the most proverb-like moment in the poem, and also the most disturbing. An ointment soothes a wound, and ruin is what makes the wound, so the line suggests we treat our hurts by doing ourselves more damage. The word "our" widens the claim from one heart to everyone. Ointment can also suggest anointing, though that is an association the poem only hints at.
The last line is the strangest: "The other is a match to any pain." We are never told what "the other" is. It might be the other kind of ruin, the other person, or the other option among the choices the poem has laid out. The missing antecedent is the poem's central puzzle, and it forces us to supply an answer. "Match" works two ways, as an equal ("a match for any pain") and as a small flame. Set beside the ointment of the line before, the two senses pull apart. One reading is that the other is strong enough to face any suffering. The other is that it only sets suffering alight. The poem stops before choosing, and the ending is left open.
The poem's significance lies in how it uses the proverb form. A proverb normally reassures us by compressing experience into something we can carry. Here the compression has the opposite effect, and the neat structure carries ideas that do not reconcile: grief shrinks as confinement grows, and ruin soothes. The reader has to do the work a proverb usually does for us. In six short lines, with a few homely objects (a closet, a prison, an ointment, a match), the poem suggests that the real danger is not loss but the loss of the capacity to feel it.