Ask most poems what a heart is and you get a valentine. Dave Bonta's answer comes in eight lowercase lines without a single sentimental word. The speaker admits to being a fool for thinking "the word heart means" something, then lists what he thought it meant: "a raw answer to my mind," "a cook's shop," "an infinite field," "a kind of void," and finally "a pair / of black horses." The list is odd, and the oddness is the point. The poem is about how badly a word like "heart" fits into a definition, and it shows this by trying definitions and letting each one slip away.
The title helps explain the method. "Heartful dodger" seems to echo the Artful Dodger, the young pickpocket in Dickens's *Oliver Twist*, with "heart" swapped in for "art." The poem can be read as the heart's own dodging: a quick, slippery thing that never stays where you try to pin it. The speaker dodges too. "Fool that I was" promises a correction, a confession that his earlier idea was wrong. But the corrected meaning never arrives. The poem gives only more images, each leaving the previous one behind.
The construction reinforces this. The poem is four couplets, with no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation. It is also one long sentence, and the stanza breaks make you stumble over it. "I thought the word heart means" ends a stanza on a verb that is left hanging, so you must cross a gap of white space to find out what it means. The same happens with "with only a pair," which hands its noun over to the next stanza. The line lengths are short and speech-like, so the poem sounds like someone thinking aloud and changing their mind. There is only a faint sound echo, "mind" returning in "kind," as if the language is circling something without landing on it. The last line, "of black horses," slows the pace with its two heavy syllables, "black" and "hor-," side by side, and the poem stops on that weight.
The imagery moves in a surprising way. "A raw answer to my mind" suggests an unprocessed reply, one the mind receives before it has been refined into thought. The next image, "a cook's shop," is its opposite: a place where things are prepared and made ready for people. Raw and cooked sit in neighbouring lines, so the heart is both unrefined instinct and something worked on and served up. A cook's shop is also small, enclosed and domestic. Then the scale suddenly explodes into "an infinite field." The speaker's idea of the heart leaps from a shop counter to a landscape without edges.
Even the void is hedged. It is "like a kind of void," three stacked qualifiers that make it feel like an approximation. The speaker doesn't trust any of his own descriptions, and that doubt is part of the poem's honesty. Yet the void is not left empty. It has "only a pair / of black horses," and the word "only" does two jobs: it shrinks the emptiness to something bearable, and it adds the one thing that gives the vastness a centre. Two dark shapes against an endless field are very striking. A pair might suggest companionship, or even two beats, though the poem never says so. Black horses may carry a mood of night or mourning, but that is only an association, and the poem leaves the reader to decide.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It treats "heart," probably the most overused word in poetry, as something strange again. Instead of telling us what the heart is, it shows a mind failing to define it and making something memorable out of that failure. The "fool" is not simply wrong to have tried. The attempt produces a shop, a field, a void and two horses, each more vivid than a dictionary entry could be. The poem leaves us the way it leaves its speaker: with no final meaning, and with the image of those two horses standing in an enormous emptiness.