Few words in English sound as calmly administrative as "I tend to business." The speaker of Dave Bonta's "Oligarch" uses that phrase, and the poem spends its remaining lines showing what it covers. The title tells us who is talking: an oligarch, a member of a small group that holds power, usually through wealth. What follows is a portrait from the inside. A man goes about his affairs while the poem lets us see what those affairs have cost, and what he has become.
The central idea is that power's ordinary routines can hide great violence. The poem never describes a violent act. It doesn't mention money, politicians, or crimes. It gives us hands, a city, and a ruined garden, and trusts us to add up the rest.
The first couplet sets this up through its line break. "I tend to business with old / man's hands." The line ends on "old," so for a moment the word hangs by itself, and age arrives before the noun it describes. Then "man's hands" drops into the next line, as if the speaker were lowering them onto the table. The verb "tend" matters too. We tend gardens, flocks, and the sick, so the word carries a hint of care. The poem will soon turn that care sour.
The second couplet makes the poem's boldest move, a simile: the hands are "as full of violence / as a small city." Cities are crowded, noisy, and full of competing lives, and here a whole one is packed into a pair of old hands. The scale is odd. Hands are small and personal, a city is vast and civic, and the comparison suggests that this man's private gestures, such as signing, gripping, or pointing, have public consequences. The word "small" is quietly effective. The city isn't a great metropolis, so the violence feels close, local, and domestic rather than epic. The phrase "full of" also makes the violence sound stored up, like something the hands could spill.
The final couplet is the strangest: "two ices that ought to be moons / in a garden gone bad." The grammar here is loose, and I read the poem as inviting more than one interpretation. "Ices" could be eyes, cold and glassy, in a face that has hardened. It could also describe the two hands themselves, pale and chilled. Either way, "ices" is an unexpected plural, and it feels chosen for its coldness. The key word is "ought." Moons are serene and silvery, and they light gardens at night. These things ought to be moons, but they aren't. That small modal verb is the closest the poem comes to conscience. Whether the speaker feels regret, or only reports the gap between what should be and what is, is left open.
Then comes the garden "gone bad," which echoes "tend" from the first line. The phrase is as colloquial as spoiled milk or fruit, and the plainness makes it chilling. A garden is a place someone has cultivated, so its ruin implies a gardener. If the garden stands for the oligarch's domain, perhaps his country or his holdings, then the tending of the first line and the decay of the last are connected by cause and effect, though the poem never says so.
Structurally, the poem is three unrhymed couplets with no end punctuation. The lines are short and uneven, close to speech, and the lack of rhyme keeps the tone flat and matter-of-fact. That flatness is the point, because the speaker sounds like a man who has stopped being shocked by himself. The soft consonants of "tend to business" give way to the harder, grittier sounds of "garden gone bad," so the poem's music sours as the images darken. The couplets also move steadily outward, from hands, to a city, to a garden under the sky, as though the man's reach keeps growing.
The poem matters for how much it does in so little space. In a handful of lines it gives a persona, a moral judgment, and a landscape, all without a single accusation. By letting the oligarch speak, it makes us look at power the way he does, calmly and as a matter of routine, and then lets the images show us what that routine has made.