Winter is the season for filling the cellar, but the speaker of Dave Bonta's "Provisioning" stocks up on odd things: paint, gold ore, a book made of iron. In six lines, the poem shows someone trying to fill a house and a season against a loss that none of the supplies can touch.
The opening sets the mood: "White winter: a mine of nothing, / a great iron book." The colon works like an equals sign, and what follows is a pair of metaphors with no verb to move them along. The season is simply declared, as if the frost had stopped the sentence. "A mine of nothing" is a small paradox. A mine is where you dig riches out of the earth, yet here the thing being dug is nothing, so the snowy blankness is oddly full of effort and hope. The second image turns winter into a book, which suits the white page, but the book is "iron": heavy, cold, shut. Iron also comes out of mines, so the two images belong together, and the book is what the mine yields. It is a text nobody can open.
Then the speaker steps in. "I dine alone with the lord of paint / and send to Africa for gold ore." The poem never says whether the "lord of paint" is a painter, a painting or colour itself, and the vagueness helps. Whichever it is, it is company that cannot answer back, and it is colour set against the whiteness outside. The word "alone" is the only plain statement of loneliness, and it arrives quietly in the middle of a line. The verbs, "dine" and "send," sound lordly, like a man of means ordering raw gold from another continent. Judging by the imagery, Africa stands as far from white winter as the speaker can imagine, a place of heat and yellow. Gold ore is also unrefined wealth still locked in rock, which echoes the "mine" of the first stanza. The speaker answers a mine of nothing by importing a mine of something. The gesture is lavish and slightly absurd, like someone ordering more and more to avoid noticing an empty chair.
The last couplet is where the poem turns: "I do not find my fair / late wife." The line break does a lot. For a moment "my fair" reads as a noun, a term of endearment, and only "late wife" completes it. "Late" means dead, but it also means overdue, as though she were merely delayed. The verb matters too. The speaker does not say "miss" or "lose" but "find," which turns the whole poem into a search, through the mine, the book, the dinner table and the shipments. And "do not find" is flatter than "cannot find." It sounds like a report of a negative result, with the grief held down underneath it. The last line is the shortest, only two stresses long, and it ends the poem with a drop.
Formally, the poem is three unrhymed couplets with no regular metre, and the lines are short and uneven. Sound still binds it together. "Lord," "gold" and "ore" share their long, rounded vowels. "Mine" and "find" echo each other across the poem, which links the mining of nothing to the search for her. The opening "White winter" returns in the final word, "wife," so the loss is tied to the season from the first line to the last.
The title, "Provisioning," is the sharpest irony. To provision is to prepare for a siege, an act of confidence in the future. The speaker prepares thoroughly, but only with luxuries, and the one necessity is not on the list.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. Grief is never named as grief. There is no "I miss her" and no tears, only a cold landscape, a grand and pointless shopping list and a last line held back until the end. The poem shows how weather can become a state of mind, and how a single line break and a word like "late" can carry more feeling than an outright declaration of sorrow.