Five short lines are enough to sink a navy. Dave Bonta's "Fleet" compresses a shipwreck, a bankruptcy and a moral fall into a single sentence-and-a-half, and it leaves the reader to work out how they fit together. The central idea seems to be that a community's appetites, whether for trade, pleasure or both, can ruin it, and that the sea, which was supposed to be the fleet's workplace, turns out to be the stronger and hungrier party.
The first line sets a trap with its sound: "A fair fleet fell into vice." Four f-words in six syllables make it glide, and the alliteration gives the fleet a sleek, handsome look. But each word has a second meaning. "Fair" can mean beautiful, or it can mean honest and just, which makes the fall into "vice" a moral one. "Fleet" can mean a group of ships, but as an adjective it means swift, and it also suggests "fleeting." Even "vice" has a physical sense, since the British spelling of the clamp is the same word, so the fleet may be trapped as well as corrupted. The poem has barely started and already the ships are both guilty and caught.
The second line brings the damage: "Frigates did us in, broke." The f-sound carries over from "fleet," so the destroyers sound like relatives of the thing destroyed. The speaker says "us," which means the narrator is part of the fleet, a survivor or ghost speaking for a whole company. "Broke" works two ways, as financially ruined and as a ship breaking apart. The comma before it makes it hang there like a second blow.
After that the poem changes texture. The f-sounds fade and the soft, hissing consonants of the sea come in: "creeping," "scuttle," "sea," "exceeding." The word "scuttle" does the most work. To scuttle a ship is to sink it by opening its hull, and a scuttle is also a small hatch on a deck. The word can also mean to scurry, as a crab does. So "creeping at the scuttle" can be read as water seeping in through the hatch, or as ruin creeping up on the crew, or as sailors sneaking off a doomed vessel. The poem doesn't choose between these readings, and the sinking is stranger for it.
The last three lines also run on, with no full stop to rest at. The sentence slides downhill the way a deck tilts, and it ends on its most surprising image: "the sea exceeding us / in business and in bed." The vowel of "fleet" returns inside "sea" and "exceeding," as though the fleet's own name has been absorbed into the water. The verdict is also funny and bleak at once. "Business" suggests trade, busyness and commerce, and "bed" suggests sex, and perhaps the seabed too, where everything finally lies down. The sea outdoes the sailors at working and at pleasure, and at the end it wins both contests by swallowing them. Judging by the imagery, the "vice" of line one is not a single sin but the whole mix of profit and appetite that fills a port town.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. Line one is close to a bouncing four-beat rhythm ("A FAIR fleet FELL into VICE"), but the lines after it loosen and shorten, and the poem never settles into a pattern. That looseness suits a story about things coming apart. The tone is dry and almost proverbial, like an epitaph or a sea-shanty verse boiled down to its last line.
What makes "Fleet" worth reading is how much it does with so little. Its puns are not decoration, because each one opens a second story underneath the first, so that the poem is about money, morals and drowning at once. It also gives the sea the last word and a kind of personality, so that the water is a rival and a lover as well as a place. A reader who stops at the first reading has a shipwreck, and a reader who goes back has a small parable about appetite and excess.