Five lines, a new boat, and a mood that turns before it has properly begun. Dave Bonta's "At the yacht club" opens like a small boast: "In my new boat I am glad to leave / business a while." The title promises leisure and polish, a man slipping the office the way a boat slips its mooring. But the similes that follow undercut that contentment.
The first is the strangest: "like a cunning fellow in a grave." The grammar lets it swing two ways. Perhaps the speaker leaves business behind the way a cunning man leaves the world, so that he is the one in the grave. Or business itself is the cunning fellow, buried but still scheming. Either way, death has turned up at a yacht club, and a holiday starts to look like a burial. The boat may even be a kind of coffin, though that is the reader's inference, not something the poem says. "Cunning" is the key word. It is a dealmaker's virtue, shrewdness that survives even underground. The speaker may have left the office, but the calculating mind has not clocked off.
The line breaks add to this. "I am glad to leave" ends line one and could be a complete thought, a man glad to depart altogether. Only the next line corrects it with the modest, temporary "business a while." That hedge matters. He is not escaping for good, and the gladness has a time limit built in.
After the stanza break, the poem refuses to settle. "Or a little blind shoe, / ashamed to be bland" offers a second comparison without dropping the first, as if the speaker can't decide how he feels. The scale shrinks from grave to shoe, from the dramatic to the domestic and faintly comic. The shoe is "little," which adds a note of tenderness, and "blind," which the poem leaves unexplained. A shoe has eyelets, so perhaps it is a shoe that cannot see. A shoe also has a sole, and it is tempting to hear "soul" in it, a soul that is sightless and embarrassed. That pun is a possibility, not a certainty. A yacht club is also exactly where one might expect boat shoes, so the image may belong to the setting as well as to the speaker's mind.
"Ashamed to be bland" is the poem's most exposed moment. The man with the new boat is worried, it seems, about being ordinary. Among the glossy hulls and the gleaming vocabulary of leisure, the shoe, and perhaps the speaker, would rather be anything than dull. Even the escape from work is shadowed by self-consciousness about status.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no regular rhyme scheme and no fixed meter, but there are chimes. The first word of feeling, "glad," and the last word, "bland," are close echoes, so the poem ends on a dulled version of where it began. "Blind" and "bland" sit almost on top of each other, and the hard *b* of "boat," "business," "blind" and "bland" gives the short poem a faint clatter, like something knocking against a hull. The long lines (the first and third both run to about nine syllables) are separated by the short, stranded "business a while," which looks like the brief pause the speaker has granted himself.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It starts as a simple statement of pleasure, then lets odd, unexplained images pull against it until the reader senses a second, less comfortable feeling under the first. It never explains the cunning fellow or the blind shoe, and it never says whether the speaker is mocking himself or sincerely uneasy. That open space is the point. In five lines it shows that being glad and being unsettled can sit in the same boat, and it trusts the reader to notice that.