Six short lines, and a whole marriage, or something like one, is settled in them. Dave Bonta's "Provision" reads like a will drafted by someone in a hurry, or an apology disguised as a gift. The poem never explains its situation, but its first line gives us the facts: "He drank his business." The verb is doing something odd. People drink wine or whisky, not companies, so the sentence compresses a slow collapse into a single swallow. Whatever "business" he had, whether a shop, a living or simply his affairs, it went down his throat. Everything that follows is the speaker's answer to that loss.
The answer begins with a deliberately double-edged phrase: "I left him." Read on its own line, it sounds like the end of a relationship, a plain statement of departure. The next line turns it into something else. "I left him / my poor housekeeping" means that the speaker bequeathed these things, as one leaves an inheritance. The enjambment lets the reader hold both meanings at once. The speaker has gone, and has also given. That is the poem's central tension: abandonment and generosity arrive in the same breath.
What is given is a strange inventory. "Poor housekeeping" is the first item, and the word "poor" works twice, suggesting both a failure of domestic care and a lack of money. It reads as the speaker owning up to a fault, perhaps with a little irony, since the person being left has just drunk away a livelihood. Then comes "my scar of purple." This is the most compressed image in the poem. Purple suggests a bruise, and judging by the placement of this line right after a man who drinks, it may hint at harm done to the speaker. But purple is also the colour of wine, so the scar carries a faint stain of the very thing that caused the trouble. The poem doesn't say which meaning is correct, and it is stronger for leaving the question open. A scar is also something permanent, so this is the one gift that can never be taken back.
The fourth line is where the voice wavers: "my purse—I promise—". The dashes make "I promise" sound like a whisper or a hasty reassurance, as though the speaker is leaving money behind and swearing it is really there. They could also be making a vow of some larger kind. The interruption slows the line and makes the poem feel spoken rather than written, with a person thinking aloud as she or he packs. Notice, too, how much the sounds of "poor," "purple," "purse" and "promise" lean on the same hard *p*. The repetition ties the list together and gives it a clipped, grudging music, as if each item were being set down on a table.
The form supports this. There is no end-rhyme, and the poem is in free verse, yet most lines run to about five syllables: "He drank his business," "my scar of purple," "and my house all night." The one exception is the three-syllable "I left him," which acts as a hinge, a short breath before the list. That near-regular beat keeps the poem calm even as the content becomes more painful. There is a faint echo, too, between "business" in the first line and "promise" in the fifth, two words that share an unstressed ending and set the cost of the man's habit against the speaker's pledge.
The last line lands lightly and then stings: "and my house all night." The word "house" has already appeared inside "housekeeping," so the poem ends by moving from the habit of caring for a home to the home itself. Then comes "all night," a phrase that could mean a single night's loan, or a long night of waiting, or a darkness that does not lift. It gives the poem its uncertainty. We don't learn whether the speaker returns.
This is why the title matters. A "provision" is something supplied, as in provisions for a journey. It is also a clause in a legal document. The speaker is making provision for someone who failed to provide. That reversal is the poem's quiet irony, and it explains why such a small piece lingers. In under thirty words, it turns a story of ruin into an act of leaving that is part rebuke and part gift, and it leaves the reader to decide how much of each.