The title is the first small joke. "Auricle" names the visible, outer part of the ear, and it comes from a Latin word meaning "little ear." Yet the poem's single sentence announces "a great ear," one that sits oddly on "an ordinary head." So the poem sets a diminutive word against an outsized thing, and then sets that thing against its modest surroundings. We get something like a specimen description, or a caricature drawn in four lines, and the question is what such an ear is for.
The answer arrives in the last two lines, which are the strangest. The ear "had some business / with the urge to be." "Had some business with" is an everyday, faintly bureaucratic idiom, the way we talk about errands and appointments. Bonta places it next to "the urge to be," which sounds like philosophy or biology: the push of life toward existence. The collision is where the poem's charm lies. Being becomes something with a desk and a case file, and the ear is the clerk. The phrase is also ambiguous. The ear's size may be a result of that urge, as if life, pressing to exist, bulged out in one conspicuous spot. Or the ear may be involved in being itself, so that listening is a way of being in the world. The poem doesn't choose, and I think it is better for that.
The sound of the poem supports the oddness. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, only one unbroken sentence in four short lines of roughly four to six syllables. The first line begins with a stumbling double stress, "A GREAT EAR on," where "great" and "ear" sit side by side and the voice has to lean on both, as if the ear really were too big for the line. The second line stretches out in the soft, many-syllabled "ordinary," then ends with the flat thud of "head," which makes the head sound plain and heavy, a lump the ear is stuck to. Lines three and four are quieter. "Business" and "be" share their opening b, and that small echo links the mundane word to the grand one. Even "head" and "had" half-echo each other across the lines, a faint chime in a poem with no rhyme scheme.
The line breaks also do work. Line one ends on the preposition "on," so the ear is literally left hanging, perched, until we read down to "head." Line three ends on "business," so for a breath the word stands alone, and we may hear it as busyness, a restless activity, before "with the urge to be" turns it into a transaction. The last line ends on "be," an infinitive with nothing after it. That unfinished verb may recall Hamlet's famous "to be," though the echo is my inference rather than something the poem insists on. In any case the poem stops without a full stop, as though the urge it names is still going on.
Notice, too, who is missing. No "I," no named owner of the ear, no story of how it got there. The head is "ordinary," a stand-in for anyone, and the ear is the only thing with any energy. Judging by the text, the poem suggests that what is remarkable about a person may be not the head, the seat of thought, but the organ that receives. The ear has no voice of its own. It is all openness, a curved shape made for taking things in.
That is where the poem's significance lies. In under twenty words it moves from anatomy to comedy to a question about existence, and it does so without explaining itself. It is also a small lesson in how poetry works: a plain, slightly absurd image, one borrowed idiom and a carefully placed line break can open a large space. The poem's form echoes its subject too. It is short, curled and receptive, and it asks the reader to do what the ear does, which is to listen closely and let the meaning arrive.