Three sentences, each alone on its line, and almost nothing else: no rhyme, no punctuation beyond the full stops, no explanation. Dave Bonta's "Proverbial (7)" borrows the voice of folk wisdom, that calm tone of someone who has seen enough to stop arguing. But the lines don't deliver the tidy lessons a real proverb would. They sound like sayings you half remember, and they leave you to work out what they mean.
The first line is the easiest to hear: "Ask me the time and I point to the sun." The speaker gives a literal, almost cheeky answer. Ask for a number and you get a direction. The line has no watch, no clock, no number. Time here is something you read off the sky, as people did before they carried it on their wrists. It runs to ten plain syllables, nearly all one-syllable words, and the plainness suits its message: the answer was never complicated, we just stopped looking up. There is also a small joke in it. The speaker is being unhelpful and wise at once.
The second line moves from the speaker to the world: "An oak is a fine scholar of the ear." The surprise is in "scholar." We expect scholars to be people of the eye, bent over books. Here the oak is learned in listening. That fits a tree that stands still for centuries and takes in wind, rain and birdsong, and it fits proverbs too, which have traditionally lived in speech and been passed on by ear. The line is also ambiguous, and the ambiguity is worth keeping. "Ear" could be the organ of hearing, but it could also be an ear of grain, which would pull the oak into a different, harvest-flavored picture. The poem doesn't choose, and the line is richer for it. Notice, too, that this is the only line with no "I" in it. It states a general truth, as if the speaker has stepped aside to let the tree speak.
The third line changes the grammar: "Comfort took me to the temple Ease." The first two lines are in the present tense, as timeless as proverbs should be. This one is in the past, so it reads like a tiny story, a single event in a life. It also turns abstract nouns into characters. Comfort is a guide who leads, and Ease is a place of worship, with a capital letter like the name of a god. The hard consonants of "Comfort took" and "temple" give the line a quiet, deliberate walk. Whether it is a warning or a confession depends on the tone you hear. It could mean that comfort sanctifies itself, so that wanting to be at ease becomes a kind of religion. Or it could be a mild, wry admission that the speaker went along. The words "took me" are worth noticing, because they make the speaker passive. In the first line he points and decides, and in the third he is led.
Put side by side, the lines suggest an arc, though this is my reading and the poem never states it. The sun and the oak are teachers outside human making: one gives time without a machine, the other gives attention without a book. Comfort, by contrast, is a guide who takes us somewhere built, a temple, and perhaps away from them. Seen this way, the poem quietly sets natural ways of knowing against the pull of an easy life.
What makes the piece worth reading is how much it does with so little. The bracketed number in the title suggests it belongs to a series, though the poem stands perfectly well alone. Its brevity is part of the argument, because a proverb works by leaving space, and the reader has to fill it. By borrowing that form and then making it slightly strange, with an oak for a scholar and a temple for an armchair, Bonta invites us to do what the first line recommends: stop asking for a ready answer and look up, listen, and think.