Nobody in Dave Bonta's "Wealth" mentions money, and that is the trick. The poem is four two-line stanzas, each a small, self-contained remark, and none explains how it connects to the next. Read together, they make a quiet argument: the things we are richest in are the ones we can't pocket, such as rain, water, love and a night full of living creatures. Being rich in them turns out to be oddly inconvenient.
The first couplet sets the tone: "rain to grow the sea / told me the reason for love." The grammar is slightly strange. "Grow" is what we do to crops, so the sea becomes something cultivated and the rain a patient gardener. Then the rain *tells* the speaker something, and the poem never says what. We get the subject of the lesson, not the lesson itself. One way to read the missing answer is that the image is the answer: countless small drops pour themselves into something larger, and nothing is lost in the pouring.
The second couplet cuts away to something comic: "false teeth / are so alone in the world." The line break leaves "false teeth" stranded on a line of its own, the shortest in the poem, so the form acts out the loneliness it describes. The childlike "so" keeps the sentence tender rather than mocking. Teeth normally live in rows, in company, but these have been removed and set apart. If we picture them soaking overnight in a glass of water, as false teeth often do, they quietly echo the rain and sea. The drops merge and these teeth cannot, so loneliness gets its own entry in the poem's ledger.
Then the speaker steps forward: "I like to go at night / to count the fish." The diction is plain and a little shy, the voice of someone admitting a harmless habit. "Count" is the language of money, what a miser does with coins, but fish at night can't be seen clearly, can't be held and can't be kept. Counting becomes attention rather than ownership. The poem also seems to suggest the wealth is in the doing, in going out after dark to look. The wording also faintly recalls counting sheep, though that is my association rather than anything the poem says.
The last couplet delivers the title's answer with a wink: "O the inconvenience / of a great blessing." The hymn-like "O" promises something grand, and "inconvenience," a long, bureaucratic, four-syllable word, lets the air out of it. It is funny, since this is a complaint no one expects to hear from the truly rich. It is also sincere. To be given something large, whether a sea or a love, is to be obliged to it, to get up in the dark and keep counting. Like the "reason for love," the "great blessing" is never named. The poem trusts us to fill it in.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Lines run from two syllables ("false teeth") to seven, and no punctuation appears anywhere, so the line breaks do the work of commas and full stops. The poem has a sound pattern all the same. Long *o* sounds run through "grow," "told," "alone," "go" and finally the stand-alone "O," as if the poem were slowly gathering itself into that exclamation. Long *e* sounds ("sea," "me," "reason," "teeth," "inconvenience") give a second thread. Neither is loud enough to feel engineered, but both help four separate remarks feel like one voice.
What makes "Wealth" worth reading is how much it does with how little. It redefines a word without arguing about it, just by setting rain, dentures, fish and a blessing side by side. Its humor keeps the awe from turning sentimental, and its awe keeps the humor from turning into a joke. By the end, wealth is no longer something you hoard. It is something you have to keep turning up for, even at night, even when it's inconvenient.