Twenty-four words, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still the poem manages to be a riddle, a joke and a small theology lesson at once. Dave Bonta's "Matrimonial" is one long "if" sentence that seems to promise a conclusion and ends on a question instead. The text gives us nothing about when or why it was written, so the best way in is through the words themselves.
The title sets up a legal, slightly stuffy word, and the poem then performs a wedding with the least likely guests. The first couple is "the match" and "eyes fixed upon noon." "Match" is a pun: it is a marriage partner, as in a good match, and also a tiny stick of flame. "Fixed" puns too. It describes a stare, but it also suggests an arranged or settled union, a match that has been fixed in advance. Marry a match to noon and you pair the smallest flame with the brightest hour of the day, a light that vanishes beside the sun, or one that a pair of staring eyes might be blinded by. Either way, the image is both comic and slightly dangerous.
The second couple moves from fire to water: "the old / swan to a boat." Here the match feels natural. A swan glides like a vessel, and a boat can be built in the shape of a swan, so one is almost a metaphor for the other. The adjective "old" lends the pairing a tender, long-married feeling, as if two partners had grown to resemble each other. The line break after "old" lets the word hang for a moment before "swan" arrives, so the age seems to belong to the whole sentence as well as to the bird.
Then comes the turn. "Could any hell have / a dull sermon" is the only part of the poem that asks something, and it can be read two ways. One reading is that if the world contains marriages as strange and vivid as these, no hell could be boring, because the imagination would furnish it too well. The other is more mischievous: sermons about hell are supposed to terrify, yet the poem implies they are often dull, and it compares them to the quick, bright images it has just produced. The fire thread supports the joke. The match and the noon sun are both flames, and hell is the traditional place of fire, so the poem lights up at the start and burns down to its subject at the end. The swan and boat sit in the middle like a cool pause. Even the last adjective is chosen with care. "Dull" is the opposite of the brightness of match and noon, and it drops the poem's energy at the very moment it names the thing it is mocking.
The sound is quiet but deliberate. There is no rhyme, but there are echoes. "Noon," "old" and "boat" repeat long, rounded vowels that give the middle of the poem a hollow, bell-like tone. The first and last couplets end on a soft *n*, "noon" and "sermon," as if the poem were closing a loop. The rhythm is a series of short lines of three or four beats, and the enjambments ("the old / swan," "could any hell have / a dull sermon") leave small gaps where the reader has to wait for the sense. Notice also that the second "married" is left out. "And the old swan to a boat" borrows its verb from the first couplet, so the poem itself is economical, wedding one verb to two sentences' worth of work.
What makes the poem worth reading is how neatly it demonstrates its own method. Metaphor is a kind of marriage, a joining of things that did not seem to belong together, and "Matrimonial" does this in front of us before asking whether any dull preacher could compete. It does not tell us what to feel about hell or about marriage. It leaves the reader to decide whether the question is a boast, a dare or a joke. For a school reader, it shows how much a poem can do with almost nothing: a handful of concrete nouns, a sly pun and a question left open.