Four lines, one sentence, and a marriage turned into a small cathedral. Dave Bonta's "Pillar" takes seconds to read and much longer to put down, because almost every word works twice: as body and as building, as desire and as devotion.
The speaker says his wife is "an oiled leg of church," and the phrase deliberately jars. A leg belongs to a body, a church to architecture, and the title helps join them, since a pillar is both a column that holds up a roof and a shape the eye finds in a limb. The poem may also be thinking of the cross-shaped plan of many churches, where one "leg" is the long arm of the building, though that is an inference. The hinge of the image is "oiled." Oil anoints in religious ritual, but it also makes skin gleam. Neither meaning cancels the other, and that is the poem's central idea: erotic love and religious devotion are not rivals here. In this marriage, one is a way of practising the other.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the sound is carefully built. Liquid *l* sounds slide through the poem: "oiled," "leg," "long," "psalm," "letter." The sound itself feels slick and unhurried, like the oil. The line lengths do something clever too. "A long psalm" is the shortest line in the poem, just two heavy stresses, yet it says *long*. The words make the line stretch out even though the line is brief, as though the speaker is lingering over a song he does not want to end. The psalm also moves the wife from solid architecture into sound, from something you could lean on to something you could sing.
The third line makes a similar move into writing. "Red letter" has at least two religious echoes. Some Bibles print the words of Jesus in red, and in calendars a "red-letter day" is a feast or holiday. Either way, red marks what is special, and it is also the colour of desire. The grammar turns here as well. "Sex the red letter I preserve" drops the verb "is," which gives the line a compressed, scribbled feel, like a note in a margin. It is also the first moment the speaker acts. Until now the wife has been the subject of the sentence, and here "I preserve" arrives. "Preserve" suggests guarding something precious, and perhaps keeping it fresh over a long time, as one keeps fruit or a tradition. That quietly implies a long marriage, though the poem never says so.
The ending is the most important decision in the poem. After building up the wife as church and psalm, and sex as a highlighted line of scripture, the speaker settles on "among my other prayers." The phrase is modest and flattening. Sex is not placed above prayer as a rebellion against religion, and it is not tucked below it as something to be ashamed of. It simply sits in the same list. The tone is hushed and sincere, with no smirk and no boasting, which is what lets the sacred and the sensual share a sentence without either seeming silly.
The title may offer one more layer. In the book of Genesis, Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt for looking back. If Bonta intends that echo, which the poem doesn't confirm, then he reverses the story: a wife who becomes a pillar is here a source of praise and a structure that holds something up.
Students might also ask whether the poem is entirely generous. The wife is "my wife," and she appears only through the speaker's metaphors: a leg, a psalm, a possession of sorts. She never speaks. A reader can admire the tenderness and still notice that this is love seen from one side. That tension is part of why the poem lasts. In about twenty words it revives an old idea, that the body can be a place of worship (the biblical Song of Songs also praises a lover's body in architectural images). It does so in a fresh, compact way, and it leaves you to decide whether the speaker is worshipping his wife or worshipping through her.