A fart is the most embarrassing form of privacy there is, and Dave Bonta uses it to introduce a rich man at his club. The simile arrives in the first line, before we know anything else, and it sets the terms: this will be satire, and it won't be polite. The comparison is cleverer than its crudeness suggests. A fart is private only in the sense that nobody admits to it while everyone in the room knows it has happened. The man's reserve, his closed-door, members-only dignity, may be that kind of privacy: a smell he thinks he has hidden. That reading is an inference, but the title, "At the club," supports it, since a club is an institution built on exclusion, a place where privacy is bought.
The whole poem is one sentence with no main verb. It never tells us what the man does. It only labels him: "this man of money." The phrase borrows the shape of familiar idioms like "man of letters" or "man of means," but here money is the only thing left to define him. The lack of a verb makes the poem read like a museum caption or a specimen label. The man is pinned down and described, never allowed to act, and the little pointing word "this" adds a sneer.
The only thing resembling an action is "to keep," and it is an infinitive, a purpose rather than a deed. He is private in order to keep his wit "in / an after-dinner glass" and his family "in a false / laborious account." Both things end up in containers. Wit, normally the freest and most spontaneous of qualities, is stored in a glass. Perhaps it flows only with port or brandy, perhaps it has to be bottled up, perhaps it is simply dissolved in the drink. "After-dinner" brings in leather armchairs and a comfortable fog. The family gets the same treatment, filed away in an "account." The poem never spells out the pun, but "account" is both a financial ledger and a story told to others. Whether he fiddles his books or just gives the club a flattering version of home, his family becomes something to be managed rather than lived with. Placing the glass beside the account puts wife and children on the same level as a drink: possessions, kept.
The form is spare. There are three unrhymed couplets, all lowercase, with no punctuation and no full stop, so the poem never closes. It trails off as if the description could go on. The first couplet is short and tight, with the heavy monosyllable "fart" landing at the end of the opening line and the soft *m* sounds of "man of money" following it. The lines then lengthen as the sentence stretches. The best moment is the break after "false." The reader hangs on "his family in a false," and the word already condemns before "laborious account" arrives to complete it. "Laborious" is the surprise. It is the only hint of effort in a poem about a man of money, who presumably doesn't labour. His real work goes into keeping a fiction going. There is also a quiet echo in sound: "fart," "family," "false." The repeated *f* carries the opening crudeness through to the end, as if the falseness has the same smell.
What makes the poem worth reading is compression and contrast. In about twenty words, high-register language like "laborious" and "account" is set against the schoolboy vulgarity of the first line. The poem behaves a little like its subject, putting a crude thing at the front and then dressing it in formal clothes. There is no narrator's sympathy and no scene beyond the club, yet the poem leaves room to think about who is really diminished. The man is mocked, but the family are the ones kept inside the false account. For a poem that opens with a fart, its anger is oddly quiet, and it works by letting a few well-chosen words do the accusing.