Four short lines, twenty-one syllables in all, and a sailor's idiom has been turned inside out. To "get your sea legs" is to learn to stand steady on a moving deck. In Dave Bonta's "Sea legs," the phrase is taken literally and then pushed further. The legs become things the speaker can pick up and carry, and the voyage turns into a scuffle with a joint of meat. The poem's central idea is that finding your balance is not a calm adjustment but an argument, between body and world, between one part of the body and another, and between words and what they mean.
The first line is a double joke. "At sea" is the literal setting, but it is also the idiom for being bewildered, and the poem never says which it means. Then comes a stumble in the grammar. Because the line breaks after "legs," the sentence seems complete for a moment: "I take both legs," as if they were luggage. Only the next line adds "to the leg of a ham." The verb phrase "take... to" is slippery too. It can mean bring something to a place, but it can also mean take to someone, in the sense of warming to them, or go at them. The poem commits to none of these, and the reader sways between them much as the speaker sways on deck.
The numbers are funny as well. The speaker brings two legs against one, an uneven match from the start. And "leg of a ham" doubles back on itself, since a ham is already a leg of a pig, and "hams" can also mean thighs. It is a leg of a leg. The ham may suggest the preserved food a ship carries, though that is an inference from the imagery. Either way, the domestic, slightly absurd object lowers the tone, and an ordinary kitchen quarrel replaces any grand drama of the sea.
Then the pronoun "we" arrives in "and we quarrel." Who is "we"? It could be the speaker and the ham, the legs and the ham, or all of them together. The pronoun gathers speaker, limbs and meat into one squabbling party. It also suggests that the speaker is not fully in control of his own legs, which is exactly the condition sea legs are meant to cure. The quarrel can be read as the lurching walk of someone unsteady, which from outside looks like a fight with the floor.
The rhythm supports this. The lines run six, six, four and five syllables. The first two are even, almost marching, and the third drops to a short lurch, as if the deck has fallen away under "and we quarrel." There is no regular rhyme, but "quarrel" and "well" end the last two lines on nearly the same sound. That faint echo suits the closing image, since echoes are what a well is for.
"Like words in a well" is the poem's only simile, and it is a good one. Words shouted into a well come back altered, overlapping and hollow, with no one really listening. That is how a quarrel often sounds. The line is also built from soft *w* sounds ("we," "words," "well"), which hum in the mouth and give the ending a rounded, echoing quality. Beyond the sound, "well" also means healthy, the opposite of seasick, and the poem's last word may quietly point to the state that sea legs promise and the speaker does not quite reach. That reading is a pun I am inferring, but the poem's wordplay invites it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It treats a stock phrase as something with a body behind it, and it shows that the phrase conceals a good deal of awkwardness. It does this through its form as much as its meaning. The sentence trips over its own line break, the numbers don't add up, and the final image is about language failing to land cleanly, which is what the poem itself has just done. A reader is left slightly off balance, and that seems to be the point.