Five short lines are enough for Dave Bonta's "False prophet" to build a boast and then take it apart. The boast comes first and sounds like a signboard: "I see clear and far." Nearly every word is a single stressed syllable, so the line strides out with complete confidence, the way a prophet is supposed to speak. But the title has already warned us, and the rest of the poem is the speaker supplying, unprompted, the evidence against himself. The central idea is quiet and uncomfortable. A person can turn his own suffering into public wisdom while the people closest to him get only what is left over.
The evidence begins in the second and third lines: "my trouble made / a good sermon." The poem never says what the trouble was, and the silence is telling, because by now the trouble has been used up in the telling. The verb "made" matters. Trouble is treated as raw material and the sermon as a product, and "good" is a verdict on the performance, not on whether it was true or helped anyone. The line break leaves "made" hanging for a moment, so that it sounds like manufacture before "a good sermon" completes the thought. Pain has become content.
Then the poem turns to the house: "I lease a shoulder to my wife / and a dull sleep to my lute." "Lease" is the most surprising word here. A lease is a transaction with terms and an end date, and you lease what you own and intend to keep. A shoulder is about the oldest image of comfort we have, and to lease one is to make tenderness conditional, handed out on loan. The wife becomes a tenant in his affection. Then one verb governs two unlike things, a part of the body and a "dull sleep," so the wife and the lute end up on the same footing. The lute, long associated with song and with poets, receives not music but sleep. The adjective "dull" could describe the sleep, the instrument, or the man himself. Whichever we choose, the song has gone slack in private even though the sermon went well in public.
The opening line also sets a small trap. Seeing "clear and far" is, in the plainest sense, being farsighted, and the farsighted are the people who struggle to focus on what is right in front of them. The poem never says this, but its geometry invites the reading: distance in line one, and in line four the person leaning on his shoulder, whom he handles so badly.
The sound of the poem is just as sly. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run five, four, four, eight and seven syllables, so the poem opens clipped and oracular and ends in longer, more confessional lines. Its one real music is the long *e* running through "see," "clear," "lease" and "sleep," which quietly links the seer of the first line to the sleeper of the last. The poem stops on "lute" with no rhyme to close it, like a string left unplucked.
What makes the poem worth reading is its deadpan. The confession comes in the same even voice as the boast, with no apology and no explanation, and that flatness is both funny and faintly chilling. It also leaves a loop worth noticing. The poem is itself a small, tidy, effective piece of speech about the speaker's failure, so it may be another good sermon, and he may know it. In a handful of words it names a temptation for anyone who writes, preaches or performs from their own life. The best of oneself goes to the audience, and the rest is leased out to the people who actually live with you.