Words ending in "-bound" usually mean stuck: snowbound, housebound, icebound. Dave Bonta's "Waterbound" borrows that pattern, but water is a strange thing to be held by, since it doesn't hold anything still. The title promises a trap and then, over six short lines, delivers something looser and stranger: a speaker whose footing has gone soft, who responds with a shrug, a snack and a little theology of luck.
The first couplet sets the problem with a deliberately off-balance phrase. "Troubled with abundance of sea" turns a normally pleasant word upside down. Abundance is supposed to be a blessing, yet here it is a nuisance, like having too much of a good thing and none of it dry. The next line, "land going to water," is quieter and more alarming. It has no flood, no storm, no cause, only a verb in motion. The poem never says whether this is erosion, rising tide or a mood, and that vagueness helps. Whatever is solid is turning liquid, and the speaker is left to deal with it.
The response is oddly practical and oddly comic: "I rent a raft and eat tongue." Renting means nothing here is owned or permanent. The raft is a temporary fix, a crude vessel for a world that no longer holds its shape. Then comes "tongue." On the surface it is simply a meat on the menu, but the word can't help carrying its other meaning. To eat tongue is, half-jokingly, to swallow speech, to stay quiet in the face of too much sea. The line works as a literal meal and as a small act of silence at once.
The fourth line is the poem's most richly packed: "a fat joy in the chapel Chance." "Fat" suits tongue's richness, and it makes the joy bodily and unembarrassed, not refined. Then the capital letter turns Chance into a proper name, as if luck were a small church where the speaker worships. The sound of "Chance" even brushes against "chancel," the part of a church near the altar, though that is an echo the poem leaves for the reader to catch. There is also a quiet sound-link back to "abundance" in line one, since the two words share their closing "-ance." The sea's overflow and the chapel of chance rhyme faintly, as though one answered the other. Faith in accident is all the speaker has left to stand on, and it is enough to produce joy.
Then the mood shifts. In the last couplet the speaker stops doing things and starts examining them: "I study how this day dissolved." The scholarly verb "study" creates distance, as though the speaker were reading the day like a text. "Dissolved" pulls the water image inward, since a day can melt like sugar in a cup. It is also the poem's only past-tense verb, which tells us the day is already gone before the speaker thinks about it. The final phrase, "without fire, sad in mind," adds the missing opposite. Nothing here is warm or burning: no hearth, no sunset, no passion. The sadness is placed "in mind," not in the heart, so it feels reasoned, almost observed from the raft.
The form matches this slow dissolving. Three unrhymed couplets, with lines of roughly five to eight syllables, give the poem a clipped, riddle-like pace. The sequence is clean: first the world (sea and land), then an action (raft and meal), then the mind. Present-tense verbs like "rent," "eat" and "study" make the speaker seem calm, even businesslike, which sharpens the unease underneath.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to choose between its moods. Joy and sadness sit within a few lines of each other, and neither cancels the other. A "fat joy" survives inside a shrinking, watery world, and the poem doesn't pretend that makes the loss any smaller. It simply shows a person afloat, fed and thoughtful, watching the day go.