Few poems get so much mileage out of one small word. In Dave Bonta's "Provision," that word is "will," and it shifts meaning within eight short lines. It starts as a legal document, the "last will and testament." It then becomes a state of mind in "willing," a readiness. Underneath both lies the older sense of will as the plain desire to keep going. The poem never says which of these the speaker has walked away from, and that uncertainty drives it.
The first line is a small joke with weight behind it. "I broke up with my last will and testament" pairs the language of romance with the language of the lawyer's office, as if a stack of legal paper were a former partner. The solemn triple phrase gets the casual treatment, and the subject of preparing for death is held at arm's length with a wry smile. "Last" is double-edged too. It can mean final, but it can also mean most recent, which quietly admits that another will could follow. Then comes "and left empty," with no object. Judging by the grammar, the speaker might have left empty-handed, or emptied out, or left the document blank. The stanza break after "empty" adds white space, so the gap is built into the page.
The reversal arrives with "and yet I could be willing again / in an hour." The break-up is not a dramatic act of will. It is as light and revocable as a mood, and "in an hour" lands almost as an afterthought. "Willing" echoes "will," so to be willing again is also to will again, perhaps to draft a new document, perhaps to take up some old resolve. The poem declines to settle it. What it offers instead is the honesty of someone who knows their own feelings can turn within the hour.
The form suits this. There are four unrhymed couplets, no punctuation, and no capitals except the pronoun "I." The rhythm is loose, close to speech, with lines of only a few beats and no regular meter. Without punctuation, lines can be read in two ways. "Without help I hope" can mean the speaker hopes to do this without help, or that having no help, hope is all there is. The sounds nudge the second reading along, since "help" and "hope" share the same frame of h and p, as if one were a thinner version of the other. The syntax also spills over the stanza breaks, so "on a globe so troubled" attaches back to "make some use of age" and the final two couplets read as a single unfolding thought.
The last couplet shows where the poem has been heading. "Some use of age" is a modest phrase, with that "some" refusing grand ambitions, but it treats age as something with possible uses, like supplies to be rationed. That brings the title into focus. A provision is a clause in a will, but "provision" also means supplies for a journey, and the word comes from the Latin for foreseeing. Having left the will behind, the speaker still makes provision. The question has moved from what to leave behind after death to what to do with the years that remain.
The word "globe" is a careful choice. It is cooler than "world" or "earth," like a planet seen from a distance or a model spinning on a desk. That distance prepares for "so troubled / and strange to me now," where the estrangement is both political and personal, the sense of a place that has changed or of a self that has. The poem is full of small time-words: "last," "again," "hour," "age," and finally "now." It closes on the present moment, not on a resolution.
The poem is significant because it avoids both gloom and consolation. It does not mourn aging or pretend it is a triumph. It shows someone holding readiness for the end and a plain wish to be useful in the same breath, and it does so in a handful of ordinary words. A legal term becomes an emotional one, and the smallness of the poem is the point, since it shows how a large question can be answered one hour at a time.