In five lines, Dave Bonta sets a conversation with the earth beside a chain of transactions and lets the reader feel how little the two have in common. "Geomancy" is built from Greek roots meaning earth and divination, and the title promises that someone will consult the ground for answers. The poem keeps that promise only halfway. The speaker does the consulting, but what comes back is not prophecy. It is a quiet, and around that quiet, people keep rearranging everything.
The first line is gentle and almost casual: "I speak with the land." The preposition matters. He speaks *with* the land, not *to* it, as if a real exchange were possible. The next lines quietly undermine that hope. The land "seems to be wise / and say little." The verb "seems" tells us the wisdom is the speaker's impression, not a fact. Silence is easy to mistake for depth, and the poem never says which one we are dealing with. The grammar is ambiguous too: the land may seem wise and seem to say little, or it may be wise and truly say little. Either way, the speaker is the only voice we hear.
Then comes the pivot, "though things change." That small word "though" sets the land's near-silence against a world of constant alteration, and the dash-like pause before the list works like a drumroll. What follows is the poem's real subject: "ore to money, money to profit, / the afternoon to paper."
The first two items are linked. "Money" ends one phrase and begins the next, so each product immediately becomes the raw material for something more abstract. The sequence moves from something you can dig out of the ground, to something you can hold, to something you can only calculate. By "profit," the earth has dropped out of the picture. The repeated "to" works like a conveyor belt, and the plain, flat rhythm of the phrases suggests how routine this process has become.
The third item breaks the pattern. "Money" is not repeated, and the thing being changed is no longer a material but time: "the afternoon to paper." The line can be read several ways, and the poem does not choose. Judging by the imagery, it may be the paperwork that eats a working afternoon, or the speaker's own afternoon turning into a page, perhaps this very poem. It also loops back to what came before, since paper is what money often becomes and what trees, which come from the land, are pulped into. The earth's resources, the hours of a human life, and the written record all end up in the same flimsy form.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines are short and uneven, longest in the middle where the idea of change arrives, then tapering off. That looseness suits a poem about a speaker trying to listen. There is some quiet sound-play, though. The "p" of "profit" returns in "paper," tying the last two items together, and "wise" and "say" sit close enough to make the land's silence sound almost like a held breath. The poem is also itself brief and says little, which makes it an odd kind of imitation of the land it describes.
The poem is significant because it compresses a large argument into a very small space. It never lectures about extraction, capitalism or environmental loss. It simply lines up three transformations and lets their direction speak: from the solid to the abstract to the disposable. The old practice of geomancy asked the earth what would happen next, and here the answer is already visible in what people do to it. The land may be wise, but it is not the one that is busy. The unsettling idea at the center is that the speaker's attempt to listen is gentle and sincere, and still the afternoon turns to paper before an answer arrives.