Six lines, three couplets, and almost every phrase seems to point somewhere slightly different. Dave Bonta's "Tools" can be read as a small, strange portrait of a world run on money and display, watched by people who have no real power over it. Nothing else is needed to follow it: it works through its images, and its title is part of the puzzle.
The opening couplet sounds like a reporter or an economist, with a hint of old-fashioned formality. "We hear nothing till matters settle" suggests that the truth arrives only after the event, once the dust, or the sediment, has sunk. The next line, "of the vast trade of money at dear rates", is where the poem gets sly. "Dear" means expensive in the language of lending, but it is also the word we use for someone we love. The money trade is vast and costly, yet the word that prices it sounds affectionate. That tension between cold finance and warm vocabulary carries through to the final couplet, which talks about love.
The second couplet moves from abstraction to a crowd: "an audience full of weak hands / and seahorse teeth". Weak hands is a phrase from the language of trading, where it describes investors who lose their nerve and let go under pressure. The poem makes it physical, so the audience becomes a mass of limp grips. Then comes the odd, memorable "seahorse teeth". Seahorses, as far as I know, have no teeth at all, so the image is of something that cannot bite. Hands cannot hold and teeth cannot grip, and so the audience has neither of the basic tools for taking hold of anything. It is also simply a strange, delicate picture, and the poem never explains it.
That is where the title becomes interesting. No tool is named anywhere in these lines. The tools are implied: money itself, hands, teeth. The poem seems to be asking who is actually using whom. Perhaps the audience are the tools, or perhaps money is a tool that has slipped out of human control. The poem leaves the question open.
The last couplet turns almost tender, though it is hard to trust. "Having love for the high ground" is oddly built, with the stiff phrase "having love" in place of the simple "loving". The sentence has no clear subject, so we assume it is the audience again. High ground suggests safety, advantage and a good view, and it is also what a careful investor or a general would want. Then the final line widens everything: "that great taffeta the world wears". Taffeta is a crisp, rustling fabric, the stuff of formal gowns, all surface and sheen. If the world wears it, the hills and heights become folds in a costume. The word "great" can mean grand or simply large, and its flatness hints at irony. Beneath the glamour, the poem implies, the world is an outfit, something put on for show.
The poem's sound and shape support this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and no capital letters or end punctuation, so the poem feels as if it is drifting or overheard. The lines are uneven: the first two run to nine or ten syllables, while "and seahorse teeth" shrinks to a four-syllable fragment, a moment of stumbling. Still, there is plenty of quiet sound-patterning. The h sounds in "hear", "hands", "seahorse" and "high" link the lines, the t sounds in "matters", "settle", "teeth" and "taffeta" give a faint rustle, and the long vowel in "rates" reappears in "great". The diction, with its antique phrases like "at dear rates", reads as though it might have been lifted from older or other sources. That is only an impression from the text, but it fits the poem's collage-like feel, with finance, anatomy and fashion set side by side.
What makes "Tools" worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It never states an opinion, yet its details build a mood of mild, mocking unease about money, spectators and appearances. The images resist neat paraphrase, and that is part of the pleasure. A reader can fill the gaps differently each time, deciding who the weak hands belong to and what the world might be hiding under its taffeta.