We usually say "force of habit" when we have done something without meaning to, like reaching for a light switch in a house we moved out of years ago. The phrase makes habit sound like a push from behind, mechanical and a little embarrassing. Dave Bonta's seven-line poem keeps the title but swaps the machine for a menagerie. Habits become living things, and the speaker's attempt to understand himself or herself turns into a strange kind of natural history.
The opening question, "How to know all my habits?", has no grammatical subject, as if the problem belonged to nobody in particular. The word "all" makes it close to impossible. A habit is exactly what we stop noticing, so knowing every one of them would mean watching ourselves from outside. The answer comes in fragments rather than a sentence: "Strange creatures / with a kind of love." The phrase is ambiguous. The creatures may be capable of love, or the speaker may regard them with it, the way one is fond of a pet one can't quite control. "A kind of love" is hedged and slightly wary, which suits a relationship with something that lives inside you and acts on its own schedule.
The oysters are the poem's central image, and it is a well-chosen one. Oysters stay put and filter whatever water passes through them, so they take in the world without choosing it. That is a fair picture of habit: repetitive, patient, mostly unconscious. The line "Oysters, which eat to understand" sets up a paradox, because understanding normally belongs to the mind, not the mouth. The poem suggests that habits are a bodily form of knowledge, learned by taking something in again and again. Then comes the oddest claim: "water is a spice." Water is the oyster's whole environment, the thing it never notices, and the poem recasts it as seasoning. Judging by the imagery, the point may be that what surrounds us constantly can still give a daily life its flavor, even if we have stopped tasting it.
The last two lines change the scene abruptly. "And the surgeon and his wife / work in my bed." Nothing prepares us for these two figures, and the poem never says who they are, so it is safest to treat them as part of the poem's imagery rather than as real people. The line break after "wife" holds back the verb, and when "work" arrives it is deliberately double-edged. A surgeon cuts, and a person shucking an oyster also has to pry something open. "Bed" has several meanings as well: the place of sleep and intimacy, an operating table, and an oyster bed, which is what a bed of oysters is called. In one word the poem puts together tenderness, medical exposure, and the sea-floor setting of the earlier lines. Even "work" is odd for a bedroom. It makes intimacy sound like a routine, something done by habit, and that links the ending back to the title.
The form matches this slipperiness. The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, and its short lines read more like thoughts that arrive one at a time. The punctuation does a lot of the work. The question mark, the full stop after "love," and the colon after "understand" give the poem a rhythm of claim, pause, and sudden turn. Some small sound patterns hold it together. The soft "s" sounds in "strange creatures," "spice," and "surgeon" run through the middle like water, and the flat, plain ending, "work in my bed," lands with a thud after the more exotic images.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it doesn't answer its opening question. It could have explained habit, but it gives us a set of images that feel right before they are fully understood, which is a different way of "knowing." Tying the title idiom to oysters and beds makes a familiar phrase strange again, and that is perhaps the poem's real lesson: the habits we can't see directly may be easier to approach through metaphor than through explanation.