The title does some quiet damage before the first line begins. A "hobby farmer" farms because he wants to, not because he has to, and the phrase carries a faint apology: this is not real farming, and the man doing it knows it. Dave Bonta gives that figure six lines, three couplets, no punctuation and no capital letters, and lets him stand in his own garden wondering who he is.
The poem moves in three small steps. In the first couplet the speaker works: "all morning I turn / the garden up." The line break is sly. "Turn" hangs at the end of one line and "up" lands alone at the end of the stanza, so the phrase feels less like routine digging than like unearthing, the way you turn up a stone or an old memory. Four words, "all morning," give us hours of labour. In the second couplet the labour stops. "standing in the rows / I look at myself": the verbs shift from doing to seeing, and the garden becomes a kind of mirror, though nothing in it actually reflects. The speaker finds himself in the soil and the straight lines of the crop.
Those rows deserve a pause. The word "verse" comes from the Latin *versus*, a "turn," and it is connected with the turning of a plough at the end of a furrow. Whether or not Bonta had that in mind, a poet who turns the ground and stands among rows is hard to separate from a poet turning lines. The garden is already a kind of page, which makes the third couplet more pointed.
Here the poem changes pace. "a simple argument for oats" is the longest line, eight syllables against the four or five of every other line, and it contains no verb at all. After two stanzas of action and looking, the poem stops doing and starts judging. The fragment is also ambiguous. The "simple argument" might be the rows themselves, straight and practical, making a plain case for a plain crop. Or it might be the self he sees, a version of him who would have settled for grain. "Argument" is a word from debate, and in older books of verse "the argument" was the summary of a poem's subject, so the garden and the poem seem to be arguing at once. Oats are about the humblest grain there is, porridge and horse feed. The word may also faintly echo "sowing wild oats," the idiom for youthful recklessness, though that is an inference rather than something the poem states.
Then comes the short, blunt close: "before art broke me." The sound does the work. "Before" and "broke" share their opening b, and "broke" and "oats" share a long o, so the last line seems to snap back against the one before it. After the long, calm line about oats, the two-syllable "broke me" arrives like a dropped tool. There is no full stop, so nothing consoles us and the poem just ends. "Broke" is ambiguous too. It can mean ruined or damaged, but it can also mean the way a horse is broken in, and horses, of course, are fed oats. Judging by the imagery, that second meaning may not be intended, but it adds a wry edge: art as the thing that trained him, or tamed him, away from simpler work.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to settle the quarrel it sets up. It never says art was a mistake or that farming would have saved him. The word "before" points backward to an unbroken self, yet "hobby" in the title admits there is no going back, because oats are now a pastime and not a livelihood. The speaker is gently mocking himself and mourning something at once. In six lines with no punctuation, one fragment and one hard word, the poem asks whether work of the hands is more honest than work of the mind, and it leaves the question open in the turned-up ground.