Four short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still a whole relationship is under strain. Dave Bonta's "Caregiver" is about a quiet unfairness in looking after someone whose memory is failing: the person losing her mind is not troubled by it, so the trouble passes to the person who stays sane. The poem never says who "her" is, and it doesn't need to. What it gives us is a speaker caught between a calm he or she cannot share and chores that cannot wait.
The first line sets up a paradox. "her mind going is no trouble to her" is a calm, almost deadpan statement. The word "going" is well chosen. It is gentle and open-ended, the way people speak when they avoid naming a disease, and it suggests something leaving without anyone seeing where it goes. Because she cannot register the loss, she doesn't suffer it, at least as the speaker sees it. That could be a mercy, but the second line refuses to treat it as one: "which troubles me." The word "trouble" appears twice, first as a noun and then as a verb, and the repetition does the work of an argument. The trouble that has been taken away from her has to land somewhere, and it lands on the speaker. We can also read a flicker of something harder in the line, such as envy, loneliness, or grief at being the only one left to notice.
The line endings reinforce this. The first line ends on "her" and the second on "me," so the poem swings from one person to the other in a single step. There is no rhyme, which suits the subject. Nothing chimes or resolves, just as nothing is resolved in the situation. The rhythm shrinks as well. The opening line is long, close to ten syllables, and it rolls along with a loose, speech-like beat. Then the lines contract: four syllables, six, four. It is as if the speaker's breath is shortening, or as if the room is closing in around a small, repeated task.
That task arrives in the second stanza, and it is deliberately unglamorous: "and puts me to looking / over accounts." The phrase "puts me to" sounds old-fashioned and plain, like being set to work. The line break matters too. "Looking" sits alone at the end of a line for a moment, so it could mean searching, watching, or simply gazing, before "over accounts" narrows it to bookkeeping. In that pause the reader may catch a more tender sense, the speaker looking over her and the long life in front of them, before the ordinary meaning takes over.
"Accounts" is the richest word in the poem. On the surface it means bills, balances, the paperwork that has to be kept in order when someone can no longer do it. But the word also means stories, as in giving an account of oneself, and it means a reckoning, as in settling accounts. If her memory is the record of a life, then the speaker, going over the accounts, may be reconstructing what she can no longer hold. Judging by the text alone, the poem does not choose between these meanings, and the ambiguity is what keeps it from being merely a complaint about chores. Ledgers are also a place to put a feeling you can't otherwise manage. The speaker moves from emotion to arithmetic because arithmetic can be done.
The poem is significant because it declines the usual script. It has no weeping, no memories of better days, no speech about love or duty. Instead it records something less often said, that caregiving is partly administrative and partly emotional, and that the two bleed into each other. By leaving the final line without a full stop, Bonta lets the work trail off rather than conclude. The speaker is still looking, and the accounts are still open. In very few words, the poem suggests that when one person's mind goes, someone else has to keep count.