Seven lines, no punctuation, no capital letters: Dave Bonta's "Watermen" looks at first like a few notes jotted on the back of a hand. Yet it is built with care around one word, used twice and then dropped like an anchor: *between*. Everything that follows is an attempt to say what lives in that gap, and the answer, delivered in the shortest line of the poem, is "the river."
The first stanza works by pairing words that are almost the same. "Fast" and "feast" differ by a single letter, and "here" becomes "where" by adding one more. The distance in each pair is as thin as that, yet the meanings pull apart. "Fast" can mean speed or going without food, so the poem quietly sets hunger against plenty inside one small vowel change. The title suggests people who make a living from the water, and the pairing hints at a livelihood that swings between lean and abundant. That is an inference, since the poem never says it. "Foul weather fair weather" has no "and" and no comma. The repeated word makes the two kinds of weather sit shoulder to shoulder, and the only difference is the pair of f-words, *foul* and *fair*. The line is heavy with stresses, almost like oars hitting water. There is also a quiet rhyme: "fair" sounds exactly like the "where" two lines later, so the sound of good weather lingers in the question of place.
"Here" and "where" make the most abstract pair. "Here" is the known spot and "where" is the unknown, and the river is what lies across the gap. Because "the river" has no verb and no article-heavy description, it reads less like a scene than a definition. The river is not a thing placed between two banks. It is the between itself, the condition of being neither at the start nor at the arrival.
The second stanza changes the grammar completely. Fragments give way to a full sentence with a subject and a past-tense verb: "we went into it with resolve." Suddenly there are people, and they have already acted. The "it" is deliberately loose. The river is the likeliest candidate, but the weather, the hunger and the uncertainty of the first stanza can all be "it" too. "Resolve" is the only abstract noun in the poem, standing out among the concrete words, and it names the one thing the watermen bring with them. It is also a word that, in an older sense, means to break something down into its parts, which sits oddly well beside water and dissolving. That echo may be accidental, but it is there for a reader who wants it.
The final simile is the strangest moment: "as into a great ore." You do not usually go *into* ore; you dig it out, crush it, smelt it. Comparing the river to ore turns flowing water into something dense and resistant, a hard body of raw material that has to be entered by force. "Great" suggests both size and richness. The work is difficult, but there is something valuable inside. The poem ends on "ore," a word that sounds exactly like "oar." The spelling points to the mine, while the ear hears the boatman's tool, so mining and rowing arrive together in one syllable. Ending on a single hard monosyllable also stops the poem short, like a boat meeting the bank.
What makes "Watermen" worth reading is how much it trusts sound and structure to do the thinking. It never tells us who the men are, where the river is, or what they are hauling. It gives a rhythm of near-identical opposites, a sudden "we," and a comparison that makes the reader pause. The first stanza describes a life lived in the gaps between states, and the second shows the attitude that gets people through it: you go in anyway. In seven lines, the poem makes work, weather and water feel like one substance that you can only get through by entering it.