A hunter who can't be tempted by lions is a strange creature, and Dave Bonta's six-line «Nimrod» builds its whole argument on that strangeness. The title brings a lot with it. In Genesis, Nimrod is the "mighty hunter before the Lord," the archetype of the man who goes after the biggest game there is. In modern slang, the same word has come to mean a fool. The poem never says which Nimrod it means, but its speaker is baffled by a man who has the hunter's job and none of the hunter's appetite.
The grammar is the first thing to notice, because it behaves like a hunt. The poem has no punctuation and no capital letters except the pronoun "I," so the sentences have to be assembled by the reader. The opening couplet, "who on a hunt / would not be wooed by lions," is a dangling clause, a "who" with nobody attached to it. The noun it describes doesn't arrive until the fifth line: "a man." In between, the speaker's astonishment fills the gap: "I never could have thought / there had been upon earth." The sentence circles, delays, and finally closes in on its target, which is not a lion at all but a person who feels nothing. Judging by the diction, "upon earth" and "had been" have the ring of older, more formal prose, which gives the speaker's disbelief a certain gravity, as if he were a chronicler recording a marvel.
The verb "wooed" is the most surprising word in the poem. Hunting is usually a matter of force, pursuit and killing, but here the lions do the courting. The wild world is imagined as seductive, offering danger as a kind of invitation. That reverses the hunter's usual role and makes curiosity the real subject. To be "wooed" is to be drawn out of yourself by something that attracts and frightens you at once, and the man in the poem simply doesn't respond. The phrase "so little curious" is flat and almost comic beside that, and "little" quietly shrinks him.
Then comes the final line, which turns the poem on its head: "the world is all cards and ash." It's unclear whether this is the reason for the man's indifference or the result of it. If the world really is only cards and ash, with games of chance played to pass the time and the remains of a burnt-out fire, then no lion would be worth chasing. If the man has simply lost his curiosity, then he has turned the world into cards and ash himself. A reader can hold both readings at once. The images support each other either way. Cards suggest boredom, luck and trivial stakes, the opposite of a risky pursuit. Ash is what is left once the fire of wanting has gone out. Together they sound like the leftovers of a campsite after the hunt has been abandoned, though that picture is an inference from the imagery rather than anything the poem states.
Sound ties the ending back to the beginning. "Would," "wooed" and "world" all begin with the same /w/ sound, so the refusal in line two and the verdict in line six echo each other. The final line is made almost entirely of one-syllable words, which makes it heavy and blunt, and it ends on "ash," whose soft "sh" lets the poem trail off like something burning out. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, none longer than about eight syllables, and the three couplets leave white space between them, which works like the silence of a world with nothing left in it to pursue.
What makes «Nimrod» worth reading is how much it fits into so little room. In six lines it takes a figure from myth, empties him of the one quality that made him mighty, and suggests that curiosity isn't a minor trait but the thing that keeps the world vivid. The poem doesn't lecture. It lets a hunter walk past lions and leaves the reader to feel how bleak that is. The question it leaves behind is a sharp one for any student: when the world starts to look like cards and ash, is that the world's fault, or ours?