Nine short lines, a Latin title and one very large word: Dave Bonta's "Mare Desiderii" packs a lot of sea into a small space. The title means roughly "Sea of Desire" or "Sea of Longing", and "mare" is also the word astronomers use for the dark plains of the moon. Judging by the grand, map-like sound of the phrase, the poet may be naming an inner place as if charting it. What follows is a speaker looking back on a time of overwhelming appetite and admitting that he has never fully come out of it.
The poem opens with its biggest idea and its biggest word: "Infinity makes / my head full." The line is a small paradox. The infinite cannot be contained, yet the head is full of it, like a cup filled past its brim. "Full" is also a word of satisfaction, but nothing here feels satisfied. It feels crowded, even pressured. The break after "makes" leaves the sentence hanging for a second, as though the speaker needs a breath before admitting what is happening to him.
Then the tone changes, and the poem tells a story. "I have been king / of the sea where / we drank and drank." Kingship brings in pride and power, but the kingdom is oddly vague: a sea, and a "we" who drink in it. The repeated "drank and drank" does the work of the whole middle of the poem. The repetition makes the drinking feel endless and compulsive, a habit more than a pleasure. Then comes the most unsettling line: "till water was / the wish of all." The word "till" suggests a limit finally reached, but what is reached is a strange narrowing. After so much drinking, the only thing anyone wants is the plain, basic thing they have been swimming in all along. Desire, which the title promised as a vast sea, has shrunk to a single craving shared by everyone. The "king" is no ruler at all, only the first among equals in thirst.
The poem's construction supports this. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short, mostly three or four words, almost entirely made of one-syllable words. "Infinity" and "water" are the only longer words, which makes "Infinity" stand out like a boulder in a stream. Instead of rhyme there are quieter echoes: "full," "all" and "still" share their closing *l* sound, and "drank" returns in the last line as "drink," as if the speaker's language keeps circling back to the same few sounds, just as his mind keeps circling back to the same few thoughts. The line breaks are often abrupt. "Where" is left at the end of a line, pointing to a place we never get to see clearly. The sea is described only by what was done in it.
The final lines, "My mind is still / in the drink," are the poem's sharpest turn. "Still" means both "even now" and "motionless", so the sea is calm and the mind is stuck. "The drink" is a familiar slang word for the sea, but after "drank and drank" it also suggests drunkenness, and the mind seems both soaked in water and soaked in appetite. The ending also reverses the opening. At first the sea (or infinity) was inside the head, filling it. Now the head is inside the sea. Container and contents have swapped places, so there is no clear edge between the speaker and what he desires.
What makes the poem worth a student's time is how much it does with so little. It never says what the speaker wanted, whether love, knowledge, escape or something more ordinary, and that openness lets the sea become whatever longing the reader brings to it. It also avoids neat consolation. The speaker does not learn a lesson or leave the water. He is simply still in it, which is perhaps the most honest thing a poem about desire can say.