A town whose business is "going to sea" sounds like a harbour: gulls, rope, the smell of tar. Dave Bonta's title tells us to expect nothing of the kind. "Landlocked" is the one fact the poem is sure of, and everything after it presses against that fact. The poem shows a place that talks of leaving and perhaps dreams of it, yet stays exactly where it is. Its central idea seems to be that departure can be a habit of mind rather than an event, and that wanting to go can be what a community does instead of going.
The first sentence turns on a pun. "Business" means trade, but it also means whatever occupies people's days. The town's occupation is not fishing or shipping but the act of heading toward a sea it does not have. "Going to sea" is the old idiom for becoming a sailor, so the phrase is literal and figurative at once. Then the syntax starts to wobble. "Which" dangles at the end of a line, and its antecedent is slippery. It most naturally points to the sea, though it could point to the whole "business." The solemn phrase "it pleased God" sounds like scripture or the prayer book, while "lay out" is oddly practical, as if God were a surveyor pegging out a garden. The sea arrives "in the absence of wine / or ships," an empty creation with no cargo and no pleasure attached. A reader who knows the Homeric "wine-dark sea" might hear an echo here. That is only an inference, since the poem never says so, but the missing wine does make the sea feel stripped of its old poetry.
The voice swerves again at "a lead foot / setting forth for France." Judging by the imagery, "lead foot" is the modern idiom for a heavy driver's foot on the accelerator. But lead is also what sinks, and what sailors once dropped on a line to measure depth, so the foot both rushes and weighs the body down. "Setting forth" is a grand, old-fashioned phrase, yet the destination is simply France, an ordinary place name that deflates any romance. The f-sounds of "foot," "forth," "for" and "France" push the line along with a kind of hurry.
Then comes the reversal: "and a mind to stay longer / before they go." The grammar shifts from a single body part to a plural "they," and the abstract "town" resolves into people. In these last two lines the body and the mind want opposite things. One is already moving, the other wants to linger. The poem also ends on "go" without anyone going. The word "before" keeps the departure in the future, so the poem finishes while the leaving is still ahead.
The form supports this hesitation. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, just eight short lines of mostly plain, one-syllable words, all packed into a single sentence. The line breaks fall on weak, unfinished words ("which," "a lead foot," "or ships"), so the reader keeps leaning forward, as if toward a horizon, and the punctuation withholds any rest until the very end. A few quiet sound-links hold the lines together. "Lay" in the third line and "stay" in the seventh chime across the poem, as though the thing God laid out and the wish to remain were secretly connected. The low, blunt vocabulary of "lead foot," "stay" and "go" sits beside the high register of "it pleased God," and that clash gives the poem its dry humour.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so little space. It never names the town or explains why it cannot get to the water, and it does not need to. In under fifty words it makes landlocked mean more than geography: a condition of being poised between impulse and inertia, with a sea that exists only as an intention. Many readers will recognise that feeling from somewhere they have lived. The poem's wry final suggestion is that the real business of such a place may be the lingering itself.