The speaker of this five-line poem starts by claiming to own a paradox, as if it were a pet or a farm animal. "I had in my cabin / that dun cow, paradox" is a strange, comic sentence. A paradox is normally an idea, something we argue about. Here it is a dull-coloured, heavy, slightly stubborn creature that has been shut up indoors. The poem's central idea seems to be that a paradox is better shown than explained. Instead of defining one, Bonta lets two impossible statements stand next to each other and trusts the reader to feel the oddness.
The colon after "paradox" works like a drum roll. It promises an explanation, and what follows is "that the sea was good at ninepins." That is not an explanation but a second absurdity. Ninepins is an old bowling game in which a rolling ball scatters upright wooden figures, and the image fits the sea surprisingly well. Waves roll in and knock things over, and the sea has endless patience and never tires of the game. The line turns a vast, dangerous force into a skilled, almost cheerful player. The poem never says whether this is comforting or sinister, and that doubt keeps it alive. The word "cabin" adds to the effect. Judging by the imagery, it puts the speaker somewhere small and enclosed, perhaps near the water, listening to a huge thing from a safe distance.
The second sentence repeats the structure with another "That". The dash that follows works like a hinge, and the image behind it is the poem's most surprising: "we hear for our instruments— / locks singing to the blacksmith." The first half is hard to pin down. It could mean we listen on behalf of our tools, or that we hear in place of them, so that human ears become the instruments. The second half is clearer and stranger. A blacksmith makes locks by hammering, but here the locks sing back to the person who made them. The made thing answers its maker, and the pleasure of the line comes from that reversal. "Locks" is also a slippery word, since it might suggest door locks, canal locks or even locks of hair. The poem doesn't choose among them, and the blacksmith nudges us toward the metal kind.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, so it reads as free verse. Its rhythm still matters. The opening line, "I had in my cabin," moves lightly and quickly, and then the second line slows to a halt on "that dun cow, paradox." "Dun" and "cow" are both heavy monosyllables that sit side by side, and the comma after them makes a pause before the three-syllable "paradox." The line feels like the animal it describes, thick and slow. Without the comma the phrase would simply flow, but with it we have to stop and look at the thing. "Dun cow" also has a folkloric, old-fashioned ring, which suits the sea playing ninepins and locks that sing. The whole poem is built from homely, pre-industrial objects such as a cabin, a cow, a game and a smithy, and none of them is high-tech. That gives the poem a fable-like quality, as if the paradoxes belong to a world where the elements and the tools can talk.
Sound words are scarce but well placed. "Hear" and "singing" are the only direct references to hearing, and they come at the end. This leaves the first three lines silent, though we can imagine the crash of the ninepins in "good at ninepins." The final image brings that imagined noise to its quietest and most musical form: metal singing. The poem moves from a heavy animal to a rolling ball to a song, getting lighter as it goes.
The poem is significant because it is so short and still manages to behave like a paradox, in that it makes sense by refusing to make ordinary sense. It suggests that the world is full of reversals, where the sea plays like a child and the made object speaks to its maker. It also suggests that a contradiction might be something to keep, as the speaker keeps a cow, and live with.