Is a garden an investment? Dave Bonta's speaker opens by asking exactly that, and by the end the question has been quietly outgrown. The poem sets two financial types against each other: the banker "raising money" and "the rope-yard's daughter / laying money by." One speculates and the other saves. The speaker wonders which of them he resembles as he tills, waters, and goes back and forth through "fine weather." No answer comes. Instead the evening corn starts telling "odd stories," and its closing observation, that these beings "live / borrowing everything," overturns the premise. In the corn's economy nobody owns anything, and everything is a loan.
The poem's cleverness lies in how thoroughly it lets money-talk leak into farm-talk. "Raising" fits both capital and crops. "Till" is a verb for working soil, but it is also a noun for a shop's cash drawer, and in a poem this preoccupied with money the second meaning is hard to ignore. Then comes "at times I am at a loss," which sounds like an ordinary confession of bafflement but is also a bookkeeper's phrase. The rope-yard's daughter adds a quieter pun. "Laying" is also the word for twisting strands into rope, so she seems to be doing her trade and her thrift in one gesture. That is an inference from the wording, but the line rewards it. Every phrase can be read twice, once as gardening and once as accounting, and the speaker can't quite pull the two apart.
The form is as unshowy as the garden. There are four tercets, no rhyme, no punctuation, and no capital letters, so even the opening question has no question mark. Lines are short, mostly two or three stresses, and they follow the rhythm of muttered thought rather than a metre. The missing punctuation lets the syntax slide. In "fine weather / going and coming," it is unclear whether the weather is coming and going or the speaker is. The grammar lets both be true, which suits a person working so closely with the elements that he can't separate his routine from theirs. The sounds do some gentle work in place of rhyme. The repeated "money" brackets the first stanza, and "till" and "fine" echo in the second. In the last stanza the hard, percussive "clatter" gives way to the soft, rolling "borrowing everything."
That last stanza is where the poem turns. Until now the speaker has been the subject, the one who tills, waters, and wonders. Then he goes quiet and listens, and the pronoun changes to "they." The corn's stories are "odd," which suggests the speaker doesn't fully understand them. The "clatter" probably comes from dry leaves stirring in the evening air, though the poem never says so. The corn is not literally speaking, but the speaker is willing to hear a language in the noise. The final lines are ambiguous too. "They" could mean the corn plants, which live on borrowed sun, rain, and soil. It could just as well mean the stories, which are always borrowed from other tellings. Either way, the banker's profit and the saver's hoard both depend on owning something, and the poem shows living things getting by without owning anything.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It never lectures about nature or says that money is shallow. It lets one vocabulary seep into another until the reader notices that "loss," "till," and "raising" have been doing double duty. The speaker doesn't end up wiser in any dramatic way. He is still "at a loss," but now the phrase sounds less like failure and more like humility, a willingness to stand in the dusk and let the plants do the talking. The gardener's real work, the poem implies, might not be producing a return at all. It might be paying attention to a place where everything is shared, borrowed, and passed along.