Most poems about voyages promise horizons, ships and open water. Dave Bonta's «Voyages» offers an itch and a body instead. In eight short lines it moves from the "urge to go on a voyage" to a search for "a nipple / in the clear rain", and the distance between those two points is the poem's real journey. Its central idea, as I read it, is that the wish to travel is tangled up with the wish to escape ourselves, and that beneath both lies something older and simpler: the appetite of a creature that needs to be fed and held.
The poem is built from four unpunctuated, lowercase couplets. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run to about seven or eight syllables and sound like speech. The first couplet is almost bare. "Body moving with purpose" has no verb of its own, only a participle, so it reads as a picture of motion rather than a decision to move. The voyage here is not a plan but a pressure, something the body does before the mind has agreed to it.
The second couplet complicates that. "The devil is in on it" is the language of conspiracy, the phrase you would use for a prank or a swindle, and it makes temptation sound almost comic. Then comes "the best way to keep me from myself", which can be read two ways, and the lack of punctuation lets both stand. The voyage may be the devil's best trick for keeping the speaker away from his own true self. Or it may be the speaker's own best dodge, a way to avoid the person waiting at home. The sound supports the doubt: "keep me from myself" nearly chimes with itself, as though the speaker were circling his own name. Travel becomes a kind of flight from the one passenger who can't be left behind.
The third couplet changes pronoun and scale. "I" becomes "we", and private restlessness widens to "history". The phrase "whatever comes of history" shrugs at the big events, but the next line surprises us: "we could wake without hurting it." The word "wake" is double-edged. It means to rouse, and it hints at a wake in the trail of a ship, which suits the title. Still, the verb treats history as something asleep and fragile, like an animal or a baby, that could be hurt by clumsy handling. The line is tentative ("could"), more a hope than a promise. It suggests that waking up to the past gently might be possible, and that the speaker values that gentleness.
That hint of an infant prepares the final couplet, the strangest and most striking. "Hunt for a nipple" is the rooting instinct of a newborn, but the verb "hunt" gives it the urgency of a predator. The line makes tenderness and need look like the same thing. The setting, "the clear rain", is the only weather in the poem. Its adjective is a sharp contrast to the devil's scheming and the muddle of "myself". Rain falls on everyone and comes without any plot behind it, and its clarity suggests a world with no tricks in it. I also hear a faint echo of milk in the picture, though that is an inference from the imagery rather than anything the poem says.
The ending is shaped as well as worded. The first six lines run to seven or eight syllables, but the last two shrink to five and four. After the long uncertain thinking of the middle, the poem narrows to something nearly wordless, and the long vowels of "clear rain" slow the reader down. The voyage ends not at a destination but in a basic craving, with nothing left to explain.
The poem's significance lies in this deflation of the grand idea of travel. It does not say that voyaging is wrong, or that the devil wins. It lets the large words (voyage, devil, history) fall away until only the body is left, searching blindly and honestly. In that sense the poem asks what we are really seeking when we set out, and its answer is humbling: perhaps not adventure or escape, but the first comfort we ever knew. Because it leaves its ambiguities open, readers can decide for themselves whether that ending is a return home or one more way of running.