Sixteen words, and Dave Bonta's «Territory folks» still manages to put a gallows and a way of talking in the same frame. The first stanza gives a picture: "frost white / on the gibbet". The second gives an observation: "the grammar out here in the country / is buttery as lard". Nothing links them. There is no "and", no "while", no comma. The reader has to decide what a frozen instrument of execution has to do with the sound of country speech.
Start with the gibbet. It is an old, ugly word for a gallows, or for the post where an executed body was left on display. Frost does something odd to it. Frost is delicate, even decorative, and here it coats an object built for punishment. The line has no verb, so the image just sits there like a photograph, and the two heavy beats of "frost white" make it feel stiff and cold. We never learn whether the gibbet is real, a relic or a figure of speech. That ambiguity keeps the line unsettling. The title adds to it. "Territory" can mean land claimed and governed, and it can also mean an animal's patch of ground. "Folks" is warm and familiar, the word someone local would use. Together they suggest people living at the edge of an authority that has marked the place with its hardware.
The second stanza switches from image to speech, and the tone loosens. "Out here in the country" sounds like someone talking, not writing, and it is longer and more relaxed than the clipped first stanza. Then comes the simile, which is deliberately lopsided. Grammar is a system of rules, and calling it "buttery" suggests speech that is smooth, soft and unstiff, a way of talking that has gone easy on the rules. But lard is the poor cousin of butter, cheaper and plainer, so "buttery as lard" is a joke at its own expense. The comparison shrugs. It sounds like a verdict from someone who finds the speech rich and a little greasy, and who is more amused than snobbish.
The sounds support this. "Country" and "buttery" share a short, rounded *u* and an unstressed *-ry* ending, so they almost rhyme, and the whole second stanza has a mouth-filling softness. The poem has no true rhyme and no regular metre, and it has no punctuation or capitals, so it keeps the casual surface of overheard talk. The hard *g* of "gibbet" and the first sound of "grammar" quietly connect the two stanzas, as if the gallows and the grammar belong to the same family of things.
The colours and textures connect them too. Frost is white, and so is lard. Lard is also soft until the cold gets to it, and then it hardens. That is my inference from the images, not something the poem says, but it is hard to ignore once you notice it. The soft talk of the country and the hard fact of the gibbet may be two states of the same material. Warmth and cruelty can sit side by side in a community, and a pleasant dialect does not cancel the existence of a place where people were hanged.
The poem gives no judgment. It doesn't say the folks are good or bad, or that the gibbet is a memory or a threat. It gives a cold picture and then a warm sound and lets the friction between them do the work. Grammar and gallows are both systems of rules, one enforced by correction and the other by death, and the poem's quiet suggestion is that "territory" is made by both. Language is treated here as a kind of landscape, with texture, temperature and weather, and the poem gets its force from how little it explains. The reader is left standing in the frost, listening to the slow, fatty music of people talking.