Three short lines, a dash, and no full stop: "Accounting" gives readers almost nothing to hold, and that is where its pull comes from. The first line, "the treasurer's accounts," has no verb. It reads like a label or a heading, something stamped on a folder. The second and third lines then deliver an image from a different world: "hogs make a cellar / out of the yard." The poem leaves the reader to work out how the two halves connect.
The title is the first clue. "Accounting" can mean the dry business of bookkeeping, but it also carries the older sense of giving an explanation, of being called to account. The poem seems to hold both meanings at once. The treasurer's accounts are what we expect to be tidy, columned, controlled. The hogs are the opposite: heavy, hungry, indifferent to order. Hogs root, and rooting means digging, so the yard becomes a pit. Whatever neatness the treasurer wanted has been turned over by snouts.
The central wordplay sits in "cellar." A cellar is a place for storing things underground, so it is a kind of private treasury, and the word quietly links to "treasurer" and to the idea of buried treasure. It is also the bottom of something: to be "in the cellar" is to be at the foot of a table or a ranking. Put beside "accounts," the word hints at books that have sunk, or figures that have gone into the red. I would call this an inference, since the poem never says it, but the pairing of money and a hole in the ground invites it. Even "hogs" has a second life in English as a word for greedy people, and "hog" is also a verb for taking more than one's share. Whether we picture real animals or a figure for appetite, the poem lets both pictures stand.
The idiom behind line three also matters. We usually say people "make a mess of" things or "make a mountain out of a molehill." Here the formula is bent into "make a cellar out of the yard," and the direction of the transformation is downward. Something level and open, the yard, is converted into something hollow and enclosed. The movement is the reverse of building up, as though the poem were describing a ledger caving in.
The sound and shape support this. The poem has no rhyme and no punctuation apart from the dash and the apostrophe, and everything is lowercase, which gives it the flat, offhand tone of a note jotted down. Counting syllables gives roughly six, five and four, so each line is slightly shorter than the one before. That shrinking is subtle, but it matches the sinking in the image, and the poem ends abruptly on the blunt, one-syllable "yard." The stresses fall heavily on the nouns: TREAsurer's acCOUNTS, HOGS ... CELlar, YARD. There is also a small echo between "accounts" and "out," whose shared vowel connects the abstract first line with the physical last one. In "hogs," the open vowel and the hard g make a thud that fits the animals' weight.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of the reader in so little space. Its compression recalls the style of haiku, although that is a comparison of form and not a claim about how the poet labels it. It sets a human, orderly, abstract thing next to an animal, messy, physical one, and then offers no commentary. Is this satire, a quiet joke about money mismanaged? Is it simple observation of a farmyard, with the dash doing the work of "meanwhile"? The poem supports both readings, and the pleasure lies in noticing that the words will bear either.
For a student, "Accounting" shows that a poem does not need length or elaborate rhyme to say something sharp. Here the whole effect depends on placement: a dash, a double-meaning title, and one well-chosen word, "cellar." Rearrange any of these and the joke, or the warning, would fall apart. The poem trusts the reader to do the final sum.