Seven short lines, a plain voice, and a title that passes judgment before the poem has begun. "Feckless" means feeble, ineffective, without much sense of responsibility, and Dave Bonta sets it over a scene in which the speaker does almost nothing. The interest lies in whether we still agree with the title when we reach the last line.
The opening admits a small humiliation. "A wind set my things / in better order": the wind has done the tidying, and done it better than the speaker would have. Grammatically the wind is the only active force, while his belongings are passive objects. His response is not gratitude but longing: "I ached / for a serious purpose." The verb is heavier than the situation seems to need. Nobody aches for something he only mildly wants, so the word suggests a nagging sense that a life ought to point somewhere. The line break leaves "ached" hanging at the end of the line before the "purpose" arrives, as if the wish takes a moment to find its object. The wind has no such trouble. It simply gets on with things.
Then comes the turn. "The rain coming / upon my bed, I went / and lay with the wind." The sentence opens with rain arriving, and the line breaks make us wait for the main clause. "I went" sits alone at a line's end, like a single step across a floor. What follows is the opposite of what a purposeful person would do. Rain on a bed calls for a shut window or a fetched towel, but the speaker lies down in it. Notice, too, the preposition. He lies "with" the wind, not "in" it, and "lay with" carries an intimate, even erotic undertone that makes the wind a companion rather than something to resist. The poem never explains how weather reaches the bed, but judging by the imagery, this is a house with a thin boundary between inside and out, and the speaker does not seem eager to reinforce it.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter here. The lines are uneven and run on into one another, more like spoken sentences than verse. Sound does the binding instead. The "w" of "went," "with" and "wind" runs through the second half and links the speaker's decision to the thing he follows. Meanwhile "ached," "rain" and "lay" share the same long vowel, so the ache, the weather and the lying down quietly echo one another. Longing and its answer are connected by sound before we think to connect them by sense.
The final line is the only one that really has a beat: "rocking till ten," ROCK-ing till TEN, with three stresses and a settled, cradle-like swing. After lines that stumble and enjamb, the poem ends by doing what it describes. "Rocking" is also pleasingly open. It could mean a cradle, a swaying branch, a boat, or something more bodily, and the poem declines to choose. "Till ten" is oddly exact. The poem doesn't say whether this is evening or morning, but a clock-time in a poem about slipping free of purpose is faintly comic, since even idleness here has an end point.
That is where the title's irony becomes complicated. By conventional standards the speaker is feckless: he wants a serious purpose and responds by lying down. But the poem's tone is not apologetic. The wind has already shown him that order can arrive without effort, and his surrender reads less like failure than like a different kind of attention, a willingness to be moved by something larger than his own to-do list. Bonta leaves the question open, and the poem is stronger for it. In so few words it sets two ideas of a good life side by side, the earnest and the yielding, and lets the reader decide which one the speaker has actually found.