Six short lines, and the ground has already gone from under us. Dave Bonta's "Seasick" opens with a speaker who has dismissed the two figures that normally make the sea survivable: the captain, who steers, and the lighthouse, which warns. "Done with" is a deliberately slippery phrase. It can mean finished, fed up, or simply worn out, and the title nudges us toward that last sense, a queasy exhaustion. What is left once guidance and authority are gone? The answer is startlingly small: "I am a hook."
That metaphor does a great deal of work in four syllables. A hook is a bare instrument, curved and barbed, with no engine, no crew, no map. It hangs from a line, waiting for something else to act on it. The speaker has traded the position of someone who commands or is guided for that of something that only dangles. A hook is also a thing designed to catch, so the speaker is oddly both tool and potential victim, and the poem never settles which. The curve of the word itself, with its doubled *o*, seems to loop back on the self, and the sentence ends on it with a hard stop.
The second sentence swerves into anecdote, and the tone changes from stark confession to bar-room reminiscence: "I once knew a fish, a scholar / at the pint." The comedy here is quiet but real. A fish being a "scholar" plays on the old phrase "school of fish," and placing him "at the pint" makes him a learned drinker, someone who talks well and knows the words. Yet what he says is revealing. He "gave out" the word "fen" as a home. The quotation marks matter: "fen" is presented as a word handed over, almost like a false address, rather than as a place. A fen is low, still, boggy ground, about as far from open water as a fish can get while still being wet. The scholar's learning, it seems, has become a way of hiding.
The last three lines carry the poem's sharpest effect, and it comes from the line break. "As a home for fear" can be read on its own: the fen is where fear lives, or where it is housed. Then the next line arrives, "of the power of the sea," and the phrase re-forms into "for fear of," meaning "in case of" or "because he was afraid of." Both readings survive, so the fen becomes at once a refuge from fear and a container for it. The sound reinforces this, since "fish," "fen" and "fear" all share an *f* that makes the fish's evasion sound like a nervous whisper.
The poem has no rhyme and no fixed metre. The lines run roughly seven, four, eight, seven, five and seven syllables, and the shortest, "I am a hook," sits like a pivot between the opening dismissal and the story that follows. The only real music is made inside the lines. The long *i* returns in "lighthouse," "I," "I" and "pint," as if the self keeps insisting on itself, and "done" and "once" share a dull, heavy vowel. The final line, "of the power of the sea," is the longest and the most spacious, ending on the one word that the whole poem has been circling. The sea gets the last word, as it presumably does in life.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves unexplained and how well that suits its subject. We are never told why the speaker has left captain and lighthouse, or whether the fish is a friend, a warning or a mirror. But the shape of the thought is clear. Seasickness is the body's protest against a world that will not hold still, and the poem suggests that this unease is not limited to landlubbers: even a creature born to the water can be frightened of it and can build a clever vocabulary to avoid admitting it. The speaker, stripped of guides and reduced to a hook, may be in the same position as the fish, and "fen" may be the speaker's word too. In a few lines, the poem shows how a name can feel like a shelter, and how thin that shelter is against something as large as the sea.