Nearly everyone in this poem is turning into something else. "All in town go by water," it begins, and the phrase works two ways. The townspeople may travel by boat, or they may go the way water goes, flowing and yielding. The next lines settle it in favour of transformation. They "talk with the water" and "desire / to be water." Dave Bonta breaks the line right after "desire," so the word hangs there as a bare, intransitive longing before the next line tells us what it wants.
The poem's most striking image comes next: water as "a dress of ten thousand hands." It is hard to say what this looks like, and that is its strength. Ripples might be hands, or the crowd itself might be the garment, ten thousand people joined into one covering. Hands also suggest applause, greeting and reaching, so the water seems both worn and welcoming. A dress is something you put on, and the idea of putting on water, of being clothed in a crowd, sets up the poem's quiet turn.
The central moment is the sentence "The water received the water." The repetition is almost a tautology, and it carries the poem's logic. Once the townspeople have become water, the river or sea can receive them without anything foreign being added. Host and guest are the same substance. The next line, "they made a great deal of joy to see one another," keeps this sameness and gives it feeling. The phrase "made a great deal of joy" is slightly off from how we would say it today, with its odd verb and the old-fashioned bulk of "a great deal." It sounds like a fable, or like something carried over from another language. That is my impression from the diction, not a claim about where the poem came from. The word "water" appears five times in the body of the poem, six with the title, and the insistence works like a chant. The town's identity is being rubbed down to one word.
Then the "I" arrives and spoils the harmony. "I left off my great skirt" can mean the speaker stopped wearing it or abandoned it behind, and either way it rhymes visually with the earlier "dress." The water's dress is made of hands, while the speaker's skirt is "great," the same adjective as the "great deal of joy." The speaker has declined one garment, and perhaps one kind of belonging, and the poem does not say whether this is loss, relief or refusal. The title also adds some puzzle. These are "Water men," yet the speaker mentions a skirt, and the poem lets that sit without explanation.
The final two lines drop into a different register: "and went to sell a horse / for a dish of herrings." After the dress of hands, the language turns plain and practical, with simple past-tense verbs and a deal being made. The tense change helps. The opening lines are in the present, describing what the town does, while the last lines are a single past action, a private errand. The trade itself is comic and a little strange, since a horse is a large price to pay for a plate of fish. It has the logic of a folktale, where a bargain can be absurd and still feel right. Herrings are also water creatures, so the speaker, who walks away from the communal river, still ends up with the river's produce on the plate. Even the one who refuses to become water has to eat it.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. Its lines run short and unequal, and the music comes from repetition and from sound. The d-sounds in "desire," "dress," "thousand" and "dish" tie the strange first image to the humble last one. That small sound-link suggests the dreamlike and the ordinary belong to one world.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it offers a vision of collective, joyful dissolution and then lets one stubborn individual walk off to do business. It does not say which choice is better. It is left to the reader to feel the pull of both, the pleasure of being one among ten thousand hands and the quieter satisfaction of a horse sold and a dish of herrings earned.